LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OP 
 CAUF9RMU
 
 f
 
 '/ 
 
 ESSAYS.
 
 PRINTED BY JONATHAN PALMER, 
 FOR 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 J. w. PARKER AND SON. 
 J. H. AND JAS. PARKER. 
 
 : EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. 
 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE. 
 
 M. ROBERTSON.
 
 '
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 GEOBGE BEIMLEY, M.A. 
 
 LIBRARIAN OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 WILLIAM GEORGE CLARK, M.A. 
 
 FELLOW AND TUTOR OP TRINITY COLLEGE, AND PUBLIC ORATOR IN THK 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 LONDON: J. W. PARKER AND SON. 
 
 1858. 
 
 [The Right of Translation is reserved.]
 
 TO THE REV. 
 
 FREDEEICK DENISON MAURICE, M.A. 
 
 THE EDITOR INSCRIBES 
 
 THIS MEMORIAL OF THEIR COMMON FRIEND. 
 
 TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 
 April 22nd, 1858.
 
 PKEFACE BY THE EDITOR. 
 
 GEORGE BRIMLEY was born at Cambridge, Decem- 
 ber 29, 1819. 
 
 From the age of eleven to sixteen lie was at 
 school at Totteridge. In October, 1838, he com- 
 menced residence as an undergraduate of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, where, in the year 1841, he was 
 elected scholar. Even thus early his health began 
 to fail. The cruel malady which ultimately proved 
 fatal, had already fastened upon him. Hence he was 
 compelled to relinquish his purpose of becoming a 
 candidate for University Honours; hence also he failed 
 in obtaining a College Fellowship. The Master and 
 Seniors, however, showed their sense of his merits 
 by conferring upon him the honourable office of 
 Librarian. From this time he continued to reside
 
 Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 within the walls of the College, where, with ample 
 leisure and opportunities for study, with the society of 
 tried friends and in the neighbourhood of home, his 
 life was made as happy as life can be without health. 
 For the last six years he contributed articles 
 regularly to the Spectator and occasionally also to 
 Fraser's Magazine; an employment which suited 
 him under the circumstances better than any other, 
 as his bodily feebleness forbade him to attempt 
 any work of scope and difficulty corresponding to 
 his mental powers. To this, his appointed task, he 
 devoted himself with conscientious diligence. Papers 
 found after his decease show the pains he took 
 to qualify himself for the responsible duty of a 
 literary judge by careful study and elaborate analysis 
 of the books he was about to criticise. Undertaken 
 in this spirit, his work interested and amused him, 
 while at the same time he was cheered and gratified 
 by the attention and admiration which his articles 
 received. In this way also he came to reckon among 
 the number of his friends some of the most eminent 
 literary men of their time. He made no enemies, 
 because, though he never hesitated to state what he
 
 PREFACE. IX 
 
 believed to be right, his own sensitive and affectionate 
 nature guarded him from the wanton infliction of pain 
 upon others. Seldom indeed did a petulant sarcasm 
 or an inconsiderate jest fall from his pen. Belonging 
 to no party and to no clique, he was eminently im- 
 partial. 
 
 With one exception the paper on Tennyson's 
 Poems which appeared in the Cambridge Essays for 
 1855 all Mr. Brimley's writings had been published 
 anonymously, and after his decease his near re- 
 latives and intimate friends were unanimous in re- 
 gretting that one who had devoted his whole life 
 and his best gifts to literature should have left no 
 adequate memorial of himself. Such a memorial 
 we trust the present volume will be. This is the 
 primary object of its publication. The editors and 
 proprietors* of the periodicals above mentioned have 
 given to the scheme not merely their ready sanction, 
 but also hearty sympathy and most kind assistance. 
 
 It was not without due deliberation that we de- 
 termined upon the undertaking. We know that 
 
 * One of these, a faithful and much loved friend, R. S. Rintoul, Esq., 
 has just been called away beyond the reach of our thanks.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS 1 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS 104 
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM 188 
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE 209 
 
 CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING 245 
 
 "ESMOND" 258 
 
 "MY NOVEL" 270 
 
 "BLEAK HOUSE" 289 
 
 "WESTWARD HO!" 303 
 
 WILSON'S "NOCTES AMBROSIAN.S " 311 
 
 COMTE'S "POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY" ... .. 317
 
 2, USSATS. 
 
 a comparison of Mr. Tennyson's genius and produc- 
 tions with those of Byron, Shelley, Scott, Keats, and 
 Wordsworth, would have abundant interest if it were 
 executed with ability and judgment. The motives 
 which, in spite of these reasons, have induced a pre- 
 ference for the former and easier plan, are twofold. 
 In the first place, the writer has no confidence in his 
 own ability for a philosophical estimate of the essen- 
 tial characteristics of the poetry of the first and second 
 quarters of the present century ; he fears running into 
 vague generalities and dogmatical assertions, where 
 there is not space for testing his opinions by quotation 
 and analysis of detail and construction. In the second 
 place, his own experience leads him to think that 
 analytical criticism of Mr. Tennyson's poems is likely 
 to be interesting and serviceable to a large class of 
 readers, though, of course, it can have little charm for 
 persons who by talent and study are better qualified 
 than he is to write such a criticism themselves. It 
 has often happened to him to meet with persons of 
 unquestioned talent and good taste, who profess them- 
 selves unable to understand why Mr. Tennyson is 
 placed so high among poets as his admirers are in- 
 clined to place him ; who say they find him obscure 
 and affected, the writer for a class rather than for 
 a people. The object of this paper is to show that
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 3 
 
 we, who do admire him, have a reason for our faith ; 
 that we are not actuated by blind preference for the 
 man who echoes merely our own class feelings and 
 opinions in forms that suit our particular tastes and 
 modes of thought, but that Mr. Tennyson is a poet 
 of large compass, of profound insight, of finished skill. 
 We find him possessing the clearest insight into our 
 modern life, one who discerns its rich poetical re- 
 sources, who tells us what we are and may be ; how 
 we can live free, joyous, and harmonious lives ; what 
 grand elements of thought, feeling, and action lie 
 round us; what a field there is for the various ac- 
 tivities fermenting within us. We do not call him 
 a Shakspeare, or even a Chaucer; but what Shak- 
 speare and Chaucer did for the ages they lived in, Mr. 
 Tennyson is doing for our age, after his measure. He 
 is showing it to us as an age in which an Englishman 
 may live a man's life, and be neither a mere man of 
 business, nor a mere man of pleasure, but may find in 
 his aifections, studies, business, and relaxations scope 
 for his spiritual faculties. 
 
 The main difficulty of the task has lain in the fact 
 that the poems of Mr. Tennyson are never repetitions, 
 in the great variety both of form and matter they ex- 
 hibit. It has been impossible to do without special 
 mention of a great number of poems, and the result is 
 B2
 
 4 ESSAYS. 
 
 necessarily somewhat fragmentary and discursive. It 
 turns out rather a commentary than an essay ; but its 
 object will be answered, and the expectations of the 
 writer amply satisfied, if it helps only a few persons to 
 enjoy Tennyson more than they have hitherto done, 
 and to understand better the ground of the claim that 
 is made for him of belonging to the great poets. 
 Little more has been attempted with the three longest 
 poems, The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud, than 
 to place the reader in the true point of view, and ex- 
 amine certain prejudices against them which have 
 obtained currency among us. Indeed, that was all 
 that was absolutely necessary, as the hostile opinions 
 have seldom been expressed unaccompanied by ad- 
 miration of the beauties of detail in which these poems 
 abound. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson published his first volume of poems 
 in 1830,* when he was an undergraduate of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge. It must always possess con- 
 siderable interest for those who read and admire his 
 maturer productions; but, with few exceptions, the 
 poems it contains owe their main attraction to the 
 fact that they are the earliest efforts of one who has 
 
 There is, we believe, an earlier volume of poems published by 
 Alfred and Charles Tennyson, but we have never seen a copy; and 
 the volume of 1830 is sufficiently juvenile for a starting-point.
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 5 
 
 gained a position of which they afforded no certain 
 promise. Many of them are exquisitely musical 
 great command of the resources of metre is manifest 
 and a richness of phraseology everywhere abounds. 
 But substantial interest they certainly want, because 
 they present no phenomena of nature or of human 
 life with force and distinctness, tell no story, express 
 no passion or clear thought, depict no person, thing, 
 or scene that the mind can recognise for a reality. 
 They are as far as possible from what might be ex- 
 pected of one who describes the poet as 
 
 Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
 The love of love, 
 
 and assigns to him the ministry of WISDOM, of whom 
 he writes 
 
 No sword 
 
 Of wrath her right arm hurled, 
 But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word 
 She shook the world. 
 
 So far from shaking the world, they are incapable 
 of raising emotions in a solitary heart; so far from 
 being instruments of wisdom, they scarcely reach the 
 altitudes of ordinary sense. Take the first poem of 
 the series, for example, Claribel. It is not quite 
 certain what the precise feeling of the melody is, 
 whether it expresses a grief that, finding no consola-
 
 6 ESSAYS. 
 
 tion in its memories or hopes, is deepened by the 
 sweet sights and sounds of the quiet churchyard ; or a 
 grief that finds in these a soothing influence. Taking, 
 however, the latter as the more probable theory, 
 though no poem ought to admit of such a doubt, how 
 singularly this treatment of the subject eliminates all 
 that is most striking and affecting in it. If we mourn 
 the early removal of one who was dear and lovely in 
 her life, and whose memory lends a softening charm 
 to the spot where her body lies, it is on her gentle and 
 affectionate nature, on her grace and beauty, that the 
 mind loves to linger in visiting her grave ; it is these 
 that make the place interesting, the recollection of 
 these that consoles us who are deprived of her sweet 
 presence. Or if the mind takes a loftier flight, it 
 looks away from the past, and from the grave, to that 
 bright world of spirits, in which the beauty and ex- 
 cellence that were so soon blighted here reach their 
 consummate flower, and bloom through eternity in the 
 still garden of souls. But Mr. Tennyson says nothing 
 of all this ; his memory of the dead forms only a 
 medium through which the living sights and sounds 
 of nature round the grave are harmonized in tone with 
 his own sadness, while the stillness and sweetness of 
 the scene soothe his sorrow into a calm repose ; the 
 quiet beauty of the churchyard blends with the image
 
 POEMS. / 
 
 of the lost one, and he thinks of her hereafter in un- 
 utterable peace, amid the songs of birds, the voice 
 of the solemn oak-tree, the slow regular changes from 
 morn to noon, from noon to midnight. This is to 
 treat human life from its least impressive point of 
 view, to feel its sorrows and consolations in their 
 least substantial and abiding power. It is, however, 
 a real point of view; and both sorrow and consola- 
 tion will sometimes assume this form spontaneously, 
 though seldom so completely to the exclusion of more 
 direct and powerful considerations, as in the poem of 
 Claribel. 
 
 The poems inscribed with the names of women 
 would furnish other examples of this perverse, unreal 
 treatment of subjects capable of interesting the sym- 
 pathies. There is in none of them any presentation 
 of those distinct traits by which we recognise human 
 beings, no action or speech, no description of mind, 
 person, or history, but a series of epithets and similes 
 which convey nothing, because we have not the 
 image of the thing which they are intended to illus- 
 trate. Other poems are uninteresting from their sub- 
 jects, such as The Merman and Mermaid, The Sea 
 Fairies, The Kraken, The Dying Swan, &c. No 
 music of verse, no pictorial power, will enable a 
 reader to care for such creatures of the fancy j other-
 
 88 ATS. 
 
 wise, both music and pictorial power are there. How 
 clear the painting is here 
 
 Slow sailed the weary mariners, and saw 
 Between the green brink and the running foam, 
 White limbs unrobed in a crystal air, 
 Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest 
 To little harps of gold. 
 
 How musical and vivid 
 
 There would be neither moon nor star, 
 But the wave would make music above us afar; 
 Low thunder and light, in the magic night, 
 Neither moon nor star. 
 
 Though such subjects would seem wilfully chosen to 
 avoid reality and human interest, they show through- 
 out great power of painting scenery, and of associat- 
 ing it with the feelings of animated beings ; and are 
 in fact pictures of peculiar character, in which the 
 objects grouped and the qualities attributed to them 
 are viewed through the medium of the beings associ- 
 ated with the scene. Thus they become dramatically 
 descriptive, and display the germ of a principle of 
 landscape painting which Mr. Tennyson has in his 
 later poems brought to great perfection, and largely 
 employed. The principle consists in a combination 
 of landscape and figures in which the landscape is 
 not merely background to the figures, or the figures 
 animated objects in the landscape, but the two are
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 
 
 dynamically related, so that the landscape is de- 
 scribed as seen and felt by the persons of the scene, 
 under the influence of some emotion which selects 
 objects congenial to its own moods, and modifies their 
 generic appearances, if the word generic may be 
 used to express the appearance objects present to 
 a mind in its ordinary, unexcited state. And thus 
 we get a landscape which is at once ideal and real 
 a collection of actual images of external nature, 
 grouped and coloured by a dominant idea; and the 
 whole composition derives from this principle a har- 
 mony and a force of expression which, whether the 
 principal aim be landscape painting or the delinea- 
 tion of human emotion, produce that dramatic unity 
 demanded in works of art. Employed as the prin- 
 ciple is in this early volume upon scenery that is 
 strange and upon emotions that are not human, it yet 
 shows its power of producing a picture throughout 
 harmoniously conceived, and evidences a capacity for 
 concentration that only needs substantially interesting 
 material to work upon. 
 
 The poem which, better than any other in the first 
 series, exhibits the power of concentrating the imagi- 
 nation upon the subject, to the exclusion of an ex- 
 traneous and discordant train of thought, and at the 
 same time furnishes an admirable instance of dramatic
 
 10 HSS4YS. 
 
 landscape painting, or passion reflecting itself on land- 
 cape, is Mariana. As the physiologists tell us that 
 the organs of the higher animals are found in an un- 
 developed state in those of lower type, we may look 
 upon this poem as a foreshadowing of a kind of poetry 
 that, in the later volumes, will be found in full per- 
 fection. In Mariana, the landscape details are pre- 
 sented with the minute distinctness with which they 
 would strike upon the morbid sensibility of a woman 
 abandoned to lonely misery, whose attention is dis- 
 tracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections. 
 To the painter in search of the picturesque, or a happy 
 observer, seeing the sunny side of everything, or 
 a utilitarian looking for the productive resources of 
 the scene, the whole aspect of the fen-scenery would 
 be totally different. But selected, grouped, and quali- 
 fied by epithets, as the natural objects of the landscape 
 are in the poem, they tell of the years of pain and 
 weariness associated with them in the mind of the 
 wretched Mariana, and produce an intense impression 
 of hopeless suffering, which no other treatment of 
 the single figure could have produced. The minute 
 enumeration of detail would be a fault in a mere land- 
 scape-artist, whose object was to describe a natural 
 scene. It is an excellence here, because no other 
 means could so forcibly mark the isolation, the morbid
 
 TZXXYSON' S POEMS. 1 1 
 
 sensitiveness, and the mind vacant of all but misery ; 
 because, used thus, it becomes eminently dramatic, 
 the landscape expresses the passion of the mind which 
 contemplates it, and the passion gives unity and moral 
 interest to the landscape. There is not, throughout 
 the poem, a single epithet which belongs to the objects 
 irrespective of the story with which the scene is asso- 
 ciated, or a single detail introduced which does not 
 aid the general impression of the poem. They mark 
 either the pain with which Mariana looks at things, 
 or the long neglect to which she has been abandoned, 
 or some peculiarity of time and place which marks the 
 morbid minuteness of her attention to objects. If the 
 moss is blackened, the flower-pots thickly crusted, the 
 nails rusted, the sheds broken, the latch clinking, the 
 thatch weeded and ^oorn, not one of these epithets 
 but tells of long neglect, and prolongs the key-note of 
 sad and strange loneliness. If 
 
 She could not look on the siceet heaven, 
 Either at morn or eventide ; 
 
 this epithet, startling at first from its apparent in- 
 trusion of the frame of mind in which the heaven is 
 sweet, heightens the impression of that tear-blinded 
 misery to which the light in its softest mildness is 
 intolerable. Even at night, when the sky is enveloped 
 in l thickest dark,' when the flats are l glooming,' she
 
 12 ESSAYS. 
 
 can only glance across the casement window. Her 
 sleep is "broken by sounds that painfully recal the 
 desolate scene of daylight; her dreams are forlorn, 
 and stamped with the hopeless monotony of her lot ; 
 and she wakes to shudder in a cold, windy, cheer- 
 less mom. The moat that surrounds her prison is no 
 bright sparkling stream ; clustered marsh mosses creep 
 over its blackened and sleeping waters, stifling with 
 their loathsome death in life the most active and joyous 
 of nature's visible powers, and giving to the captive 
 a striking emblem of her own choked and stagnant 
 existence. The poplar hard by is never in repose, 
 shaking like a sick man in a fever ; for leagues round 
 spreads the ' level waste, the rounding grey,' with no 
 object, no variety, to interest the attention. What 
 moves, moves always, harassing the nerves, what is 
 at rest seems dead, striking cold the heart. It is 
 needless to pursue this analysis throughout a poem 
 so familiar. The effect is felt by the reader with 
 hardly a consciousness of the skill of the writer, or 
 of the intense dramatic concentration implied in such 
 employment of language. If expression were the 
 highest aim of poetry, Mariana in the Moated Grange 
 must be counted among the most perfect of poems, in 
 spite of an occasional weakness of phrase. But almost 
 perfect as the execution is, the subject is presented too
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 13 
 
 purely as a picture of hopeless, unrelieved suffering, to 
 deserve the name of a great poem. The suffering is, 
 so to speak, distinct and individual, but the woman 
 who suffers is vague and indistinct; we have no 
 interest in her, because we know nothing about her 
 story or herself in detail ; she is not a wronged and 
 deserted woman, but an abstract generalization of 
 wronged and deserted womanhood ; all the individu- 
 ality is bestowed upon the landscape in which she is 
 placed. This again, as was said of Claribel, is to 
 view human life from its least affecting and impres- 
 sive side. 
 
 The task that lies before us will not allow us to 
 dwell longer on the poems of the first volume. Taken 
 as a whole, they indicate that Mr. Tennyson set out 
 with the determination to be no copyist, and to ab- 
 stain from setting to verse the mere personal emotions 
 of his own actual life. Even the few poems that did 
 express personal emotion he has excluded from his 
 collected edition. 
 
 To hold converse with all forms 
 Of the manysided mind, 
 
 to present not feelings, but the objects which excite 
 feelings, must have been very distinctly his aim at this 
 period. And it is worth noticing, that, though he 
 lived at this time in the centre of the most distin-
 
 14 ESSAYS. 
 
 guished young men of his University, his poems 
 present but faint evidence of this. He seems to have 
 deliberately abstained from any attempt to paint the 
 actual human life about him, or to give a poetical form 
 to such impressions of real life as he might have ob- 
 tained from reading. No one who knows the men 
 with whom he lived, or who has read his later poems, 
 can doubt that the sympathies with human emotion, 
 the noble views of human character and destiny, that 
 distinguish his mature poems, must have then existed 
 in the man ; and we must therefore infer that he did 
 not feel his mastery over the instruments of his art 
 sufficient to justify him in delineating human life. 
 His knowledge of the modes in which emotion and 
 character manifest themselves, must have appeared to 
 him too imperfect to attempt their exhibition in rhyth- 
 mical forms these forms being no mere conventional 
 arrangement of words to please the ear, but the ex- 
 pression of the delight of the poet at the beauty and 
 completeness of the pictures vividly present to his 
 imagination; and in their highest symbolic value, 
 representing the poet's insight into the moral meaning 
 of life, and his vision of a perfect order and harmony 
 in the universe, of the triumph of good over evil. 
 To attain skill in the employment of rhythmical forms, 
 to sing nobly and naturally, to form a style capable
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 15 
 
 of musically expressing his ideas, as ripening intellect 
 and enlarged experience should supply him with ideas 
 demanding musical expression, may be set down as 
 the aim, more or less conscious, of this first poetical 
 series. Probably to the avoidance of subjects beyond 
 his powers, to the careful elaboration of his style, the 
 world may be indebted for the perfection of his later 
 poems. Had he begun with Balder or Festus, he 
 would not have afterwards produced The Morte d' Ar- 
 thur, The Gardener s Daughter, Locksley Hall, and 
 In Memoriam. Mariana in the Moated Grange marks 
 the highest point of the first flight, and in that the 
 power of the artist is shown, in the complete presenta- 
 tion of a limited and peculiar view of the subject, 
 rather than in the ethical or poetical value of the con- 
 ception. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson's second volume bears the date of 
 1833. It contains some poems which their author has 
 not thought worthy of preservation, and some others 
 which take their place among his collected poems, 
 considerably altered. But characterised as a whole, in 
 comparison with the first volume, it marks a surprising 
 advance, both in conception and execution. Mariana, 
 and perhaps Recollections of the Arabian Nights, are 
 the only poems of the first series that would have had 
 a chance of being remembered for their own merits,
 
 16 ass AYS. 
 
 and they are both admirably executed, rather than 
 interesting. But in the second volume, The Miller s 
 Daughter, ^Enone, The Palace of Art, The May 
 Queen, and The Lotos Eaters would, even in their 
 original forms, have been enduring memorials of a 
 rare poetic faculty. In The Miller's Daughter and 
 The May Queen the affections of our every-day life, 
 and the scenery with which they associate themselves, 
 become for the first time the subject of Mr. Tenny- 
 son's art; and we appreciate the important principle 
 of treating landscape as dynamically related to emotion 
 when we see it applied to feelings which powerfully 
 affect us, and with whose action we are sufficiently 
 familiar to sympathize. In the two Marianas this 
 principle is carried thoroughly out, but under con- 
 ditions which interfere with our hearty enjoyment of 
 the poems. Partly, no doubt, the contemplation of 
 unmixed pain that serves no disciplinal aim is painful, 
 however exquisitely it may be delineated, and hardly 
 consistent with the delight we expect from every work 
 of art; but the absence from both the Marianas of 
 any but the faintest traces of the previous story, and 
 of any traits of individual character, has more to do 
 with this want of popular interest. They are, as was 
 said before, not women whose history and character 
 we can realize sufficiently to care about them, but
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 17 
 
 abstract types ; and the consequence of this is, that 
 the landscape element predominates too much. In- 
 stead of serving simply to reflect and render legible 
 the misery of the women, it becomes itself the prin- 
 cipal object, and the women are lost in its details. 
 Besides, we feel that no human life could possibly 
 endure a loneliness and wretchedness so unmixed 
 as are depicted, and that these pictures are not true 
 because they leave out elements essential to the 
 real drama, which they present in part. But in 
 Tfie Miller s Daughter there is a stoiy which tells 
 the leading incidents of a life, there are real per- 
 sons presented, with their distinguishing traits j and 
 the scenery, though intimately blended with the life, 
 and entering as an indispensable element in the 
 story, because indissolubly connected with the me- 
 mories of the speaker, becomes subordinate, and no 
 longer overrides the human interest. And it is only 
 in this way, when emotion is presented in connec- 
 tion with the incidents out of which it rises, and 
 with the persons who experience it, and when the 
 scenery is made to reflect, not simple emotion, but 
 the emotion of distinct persons, that an interesting 
 poem can be written, and the affections of the reader 
 sincerely touched. So long as the emotion is pre- 
 sented without a distinct conception of the person 
 
 C
 
 18 ass ATS. 
 
 experiencing it, and the cause why, and the scenery 
 is presented through the medium of this abstract 
 emotion, as it may be called, the skill of the artist 
 may be admired, but he will not be a popular poet ; 
 and a poet who does not write at the heart of a 
 people is no poet at all. The Miller's Daughter 
 and The May Queen at once established Mr. Ten- 
 nyson's capacity for becoming a popular poet, and 
 made him one within a limited circle. Their charm 
 consists in the real interest of lives moved by the 
 simplest affections and the simplest enjoyments, and 
 in the skill with which these lives are presented as 
 complete dramas, though each poem is extended in 
 time only through an ordinary conversation. It is 
 in each case a life reviewed by the speaker under 
 the emotion that belongs to a particular moment; 
 and the golden calm that rests upon the one, and 
 the sweet innocence that shines through the other, 
 belong naturally to the circumstances under which 
 the reminiscences are uttered. Nothing of truth is 
 sacrificed to ideality, but such ideality as gives both 
 unity of colouring throughout, and guides the selec- 
 tion of details, is the true result of the emotion 
 of each speaker. Thus the charm of completeness, 
 which is the aim of narrative, is united with the 
 power over the sympathies possessed by the spon-
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 
 
 taneous outpouring of feeling ; and a lyrical flow of 
 emotion is made to hold in solution, as it were, 
 the constituents of a drama or a novel. 
 
 But it must not be supposed, because these two 
 poems have been contrasted with the Marianas and 
 shown to have more power over the affections, more 
 of the elements necessary to popularity, that the 
 Marianas are failures of the poet to work out his 
 own intentions. Neither Mariana professes to be a 
 tale of human passion, with its alternations of joy 
 and sorrow. Had the excitement of pity, or any 
 mere emotion, been the object of the poet, we must 
 think him obtuse not to know that his mode of pre- 
 senting the tale would but feebly answer his purpose. 
 We see by The Miller s Daughter and the May Queen 
 that he can move us to tears, or fill us with serene 
 delight, if such were his object. But if we revert 
 to the second Mariana, transported to an Italian 
 landscape, we see her as in a picture, lovely in her 
 lonely wretchedness ; we see the landscape round 
 her ministering torture to her heart and senses, that 
 long for quiet sound and shadow. We go with her 
 in her dream to her breezy mountain home, we 
 wake with her to the torturing glare of the blinding 
 noon-day heat, we breathe with her as she leans 
 at evening on her balcony, while Hesper sheds divine 
 C2
 
 20 ESSAYS. 
 
 solace on her soul, and coolness and soft distant 
 sounds bring a semblance of repose. In that dream 
 of home and of the past, in the recurrence of a kind 
 of comfort in the cool evening, in her prayer to the 
 Madonna, and even in the distinct picture of her 
 beauty, we recognise the superiority to the first 
 Mariana, and the growth of Mr. Tennyson's genius. 
 But one touch of grief that should connect itself 
 with a definite incident, or a person brought clearly 
 before the mind, would excite more pity, more affec- 
 tion to her, and more indignation against her false 
 lover. She would walk out of her frame, and be- 
 come a woman with a history and with relations 
 to the common world, and our emotional sympathies 
 would at once flow forth towards her. At present 
 it is the perceptive faculties that are occupied with 
 her, which are thronged with images making up 
 a picture. No doubt the picture is intelligible 
 enough for the imagination of the reader to supply 
 the history without difficulty in its general character, 
 but the mind has no strong grasp of what is appre- 
 hended only in its general character ; and the poem, 
 as it stands before us, remains a beautiful picture, 
 rather than an affecting love story, and this though 
 it is the crisis of a thousand affecting love stories. 
 If Mr. Tennyson had chosen to stamp that indivi-
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 21 
 
 duality of character and incident which gives its 
 charm to life, and to the fiction which aims at pre- 
 senting real life, we have evidence that he could, 
 at this time, have done it. Instead of that he tells 
 us no more of his Italian Mariana than if she were 
 painted for us in a picture by Millais, except that 
 the poem gives us changes of time and scenery as 
 a compensation for that vividness of presentation 
 denied to words. It is the development from the 
 painter to the poet, from the man who can make 
 beautiful pictures to the man who can present human 
 life, with all its activities of noble thought and pure 
 affection, and, in presenting it, can justify its being 
 to the heart and reason, that marks Mr. Tennyson's 
 poetic course. 
 
 But through the greater portion of the second 
 volume the painter predominates. We have no poems 
 to place by the side of The Miller's Daughter and 
 The May Queen. The Lady of Shalott, founded on 
 an incident in King Arthur, is so treated as to 
 eliminate all the human interest of the original story, 
 and the process gives us a being whose existence 
 passes without emotion, without changes, without 
 intelligible motive for living on, without hope or 
 fear here or hereafter. Nothing remains but the faint 
 shadow of humanity, from which life, and motion,
 
 22 ESSAYS. 
 
 and substance have departed. All this price to gain 
 perfect serenity, and some new phase of being for 
 the reflective faculty to make what it can of, per- 
 haps to cause our human heart to beat the stronger 
 for reaction ! Considered merely as a picture, The 
 Lady of Shalott has a serene beauty, and clear land- 
 scape features, that only make one more angry that 
 so much skill in presenting objects should be em- 
 ployed upon a subject that can only amuse the 
 imagination. 
 
 The poem to which, in subsequent editions, the 
 name of Fatima is given, cannot be charged with 
 want of passion; but, like the Marianas, it leaves 
 the reader too much to supply in the way of story 
 and person. It would be doing it injustice to call 
 it the concentrated essence of Byron's Gulnares, 
 Zuleikas, et id genus omne; for Byron never reached 
 any point near this 'withering might' of love. But 
 as it stands, it is too fragmentary, a mere study, 
 though so finished as to make one long for the poem 
 which should have developed it. One would think 
 that Mr. Tennyson must have been smitten with 
 a determinate aversion to popularity, and, at the same 
 time, have resolved to show what a power of intense 
 passionate expression he was master of, when he 
 left such a poem without beginning, middle, or end.
 
 TUNFYSON'S POEMS. 23 
 
 Perhaps, however, in his opinion, this overmaster- 
 ing Eastern passion, that, like a fever, dries up and 
 exhausts mind and Tbody, has no phases capable of 
 forming into a story or drama. It may be the very 
 essence of this type of love that it should not rise 
 by degrees, by half-confidences, by all the pleasant 
 stages of Western love, but burst forth at once into 
 full consciousness, and know no changes but the 
 fiercest extremes of tenderness and exhaustion. In 
 that case, its true poetic expression would be given 
 in the passionate utterance of desire strained to agony 
 and, be that as it may, the effect of such passion, 
 in morbidly heightening the nervous sensibility, and 
 giving a painful intensity to all impressions on the 
 senses, is indicated with marvellous force of ima- 
 gination, and rendered into language and rhythm 
 which pour forth like a flood of lava from a volcano 
 in eruption. 
 
 The pre-eminence of the painter reappears in 
 jEnone. If the poet's object had been to tell a 
 moving story of love, and wrong, and grief, he would 
 not have chosen for his heroine a mythological 
 nymph, nor have thrown his incidents back to the 
 siege of Troy, and among beings whose existence 
 is no longer believed in. As little is his purpose, 
 in treating Greek mythology, akin to Shelley's, who
 
 24 ESSAYS. 
 
 clothes in its forms a sentimental nature-philosophy, 
 and a pantheistical worship. ^Enone is more akin 
 in spirit to Endymion and Hyperion; but its verse 
 is more majestic, and its luxuriant pictorial richness 
 more controlled by definite conception, more articu- 
 lated by fine drawing, than even the latter and 
 greater of Keats's two poems. Gorgeous mountain 
 and figure painting stand here as the predominant 
 aim as clearly as in any picture by Titian or Turner ; 
 only poetry will not lose her prerogative of speech, 
 and will paint her mountains and her figures in a 
 medium of passion to which the artist upon canvas 
 vainly aspires. Round Ida and its valleys, round 
 Troas and its windy citadel, -ZEnone can pour the 
 enchantment of her memories of love and grief. To 
 her can the naked goddesses painted as Rubens 
 could not paint them, life, motion, and floating 
 lights utter celestial music, and grand thoughts ally 
 themselves with splendid pictures. If the wish will 
 force its way, that Greek mythology might be left 
 at peace in its tomb, and that a harp so strung to 
 passion and to thought should pour the spell of its 
 music upon a theme in which the imagination should 
 harmonize and interpret the life of the men and 
 women about us, we can but answer, that the deeper 
 music will yet beat itself out, that this is but pre-
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 25 
 
 lude, showing the artist's power and perfecting his 
 hand. 
 
 The Lotos Eaters carries Tennyson's tendency to 
 pure sestheticism to an extreme point. It is picture 
 and music, and nothing more. The writer did not 
 suppose he was writing Hamlet, or solving u the 
 riddle of the painful earth." Nor must we go to 
 the work with that demand upon it. If music and 
 picture the feelings of imaginary beings, in a pure 
 region of imagination, perfectly presented in rhyth- 
 mical language that takes the formative impulse of 
 the feeling, as falling water does of the forces that 
 draw it into a flashing curve have no charm for 
 any mind, that mind can find no interest in The 
 Lotos Eaters. To attempt to treat it as an allegory, 
 which figures forth the tendency to abandon the 
 battle of life, to retire from a fruitless, ever-renewed 
 struggle, to read it as we should read The Pilgrim's 
 Progress, and look out for facts of actual experience 
 which answer to its images, is as monstrous and 
 perverse as it would be to test a proposition of geo- 
 metry by its rhythm and imagery. A mood of 
 feeling, of course, it represents, and feeling depen- 
 dent on, and directed to distinct objects, in this 
 latter respect, alone, differing from music. We may, 
 of course, too, apply the mood of feeling thus de-
 
 26 ESSAYS. 
 
 picted to the real events of life, and translate it into 
 the actual language of men under the influence of 
 ' mild-eyed melancholy.' So we might with a sonata 
 of Beethoven's, but the application is ours, and 
 not the composer's ; and if we attempt to limit the 
 composer to our interpretation, rather than give our- 
 selves up to his free inspiration from a purely musical 
 impulse, all we get by it is, generally, a very poor 
 verbal poem, instead of a noble work that does not, 
 however, belong to the region of articulate speech. 
 It is, perhaps, because the companion poem of the 
 Hesperides does not even represent a mood of feel- 
 ing, as well as because it is far less perfect in exe- 
 cution, that it has been left out of succeeding editions. 
 It may be suggested that The Palace of Art 
 contradicts what has been said of Mr. Tennyson's 
 tendency to paint pictures rather than to dramatize 
 life and its emotions. And had the conception of 
 the poem been adequately worked out, it would have 
 reached the highest point of view from which life 
 can be surveyed. The poet himself declares it to 
 be an allegory, and, therefore, to have an interest 
 mainly ethical, to which, by the nature of the case, 
 all mere pictorial or musical beauty is to be subor- 
 dinate. But how has the conception been carried 
 out ? Has the poet's intention been adequately rea-
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 27 
 
 lized, or has the fully developed pictorial and rhyth- 
 mical talent been too much for his less highly 
 developed dramatic and philosophic power ? No one 
 can read the poem and fail to see that only half 
 his intention has been completed; and that, in spite 
 of himself, the pictorial and musical element has 
 prevailed over the moral and philosophic aim. With 
 the site, construction, and furniture of The Soul's 
 Palace, he must be a fastidious critic who would 
 not be highly delighted, the finest ideal Strawberry 
 Hill that ever poet's brain conceived. With the 
 truth of the lesson, too, no moralist can quarrel. It 
 is profoundly true that a mere artistic enjoyment 
 of the universe will make no great soul permanently 
 happy. To make the poem perfect, the process of 
 the soul's growing discontent with, and final disgust 
 at, the beautiful objects with which it has surrounded 
 itself, should have been displayed and accounted 
 for, since, as mere statement, it is a truism. If a 
 real man has come to the conclusion that his happi- 
 ness consists in perfect isolation from his fellow- 
 creatures in act and sympathy, in letting the world 
 and his fellow-men enter his thoughts solely as 
 pictures to be enjoyed for their variety, one of two 
 things happens to him, either that his pictures cease 
 to amuse him when his appetite for novelty is worn
 
 28 ESSAYS. 
 
 out, or arouse his sympathies for the men and women 
 whose lives and thoughts they shadow forth, his 
 awe and adoration of the source of all this wondrous 
 activity, his desire to understand the meaning and 
 purpose of it all. Mere variety, that does not suc- 
 ceed in exciting these feelings, soon wearies ; for the 
 infinite element in life is not the variety of things 
 by which we are acted on, but the unfathomable 
 personality of our own being; and it is just this 
 personality which the soul in the poem is doing all 
 he can to quench in himself. He is trying to live 
 by the outward things about him, and by the enjoy- 
 ment they afford to his intellect ; while he ignores 
 that relation to God and to his fellow-beings, in 
 the consciousness and acknowledgment of which 
 spiritual life consists. When, then, his beautiful 
 objects pall upon him, as his intellectual and per- 
 ceptive craving is wearied, they become dead things, 
 and loathsome in his eyes a disgust at his life seizes 
 him, while he shrinks in horror from the prospec- 
 tive isolation of death. The soul that has not exer- 
 cised itself in feelings which grow by what they feed 
 on must experience inconceivable horror at the decay 
 of its intellectual and perceptive activities, unless it 
 contemplates annihilation. But the soul in The 
 Palace has reasoned itself into a conviction of im-
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 29 
 
 mortality, and the pride which in its case lay at the 
 bottom of that conviction, becomes its own scourge. 
 For immortality becomes blank endless isolation, not 
 merely from sympathies, but from objects of in- 
 terest, one never-ceasing death in life. Scorn of 
 himself is born of this gloom and misery vain at- 
 tempts to rally by recalling memories of past strength 
 and enjoyment soon give way to fixed despair. 
 Feeling himself wretched, the desire of pity comes 
 upon him, and the fellow-feeling comes with the 
 sense of the need of fellow-feeling. He sees that 
 the wretched people whom he had despised were 
 necessary to him, he casts away his proud seclu- 
 sion, abandons his life of intellect and enjoyment 
 to mourn and work with the herd, if so be he may 
 obtain pardon for his inhuman sin. 
 
 Something of this process is no doubt described 
 in the poem, but not with sufficient fulness or clear- 
 ness. As the mere statement of the law that the 
 soul cannot live in isolation is a truism, the chief 
 interest of the poem should have been thrown upon 
 the development of the law in operation ; the reader 
 should have been made to go along with the soul 
 in its exultation, in its first start of doubtful sus- 
 picion, in its gradual perception of the horrors of its 
 condition, in its slow but sure realization of its own
 
 30 ESSAYS. 
 
 wretchedness, in its prostration of self-abhorrence 
 and remorse. A nobler allegory could not be con- 
 ceived, or one more fitted to the age, and to the 
 highest intellects of all ages. But it fails just where 
 it ought to have been strongest ; and what we have 
 is a series of magnificent pictures in magnificent 
 verse, followed, indeed, by a statement of the moral 
 in very noble stanzas, but by no adequate dramatic 
 presentation of the mode in which the great law of 
 humanity works out its processes in the soul. What 
 is subordinate in object not only fills more space 
 that were unimportant, but in force of treatment, 
 in interest, the furniture of The Palace quite sur- 
 passes the vindication of the moral law. Indeed, 
 it has been profanely remarked that the poem resem- 
 bles a catalogue raisonnee, richly illuminated, of the 
 effects of a soul compelled for a time to quit its 
 mansion, and wishing to dispose of its furniture by 
 auction. Perhaps it would have been impossible 
 adequately to impress the moral without descend- 
 ing altogether from the heights of allegory, and pre- 
 senting a drama of actual human experience. The 
 universal law would have been best shown in a 
 particular case, and in connexion with an intelligi- 
 ble human life. But even under the conditions of 
 the allegory more emphasis might and ought to have
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 31 
 
 been given to the main end and purpose of the poem, 
 and less, comparatively, to its machinery. Though 
 many alterations have been made in subsequent 
 editions, this main defect of structure has never been 
 remedied. 
 
 With the publication of the Third Series, in 1842, 
 Mr. Tennyson appears distinctly as the poet of his 
 own age. His apprenticeship is over, his mastery 
 over the instruments of his art is complete, and he 
 employs it in either presenting the life of his con- 
 temporaries, the thoughts, incidents, and emotions 
 of the nineteenth century in England, or in treating 
 legend and history with reference to the moral and 
 intellectual sympathies now active amongst us. In 
 other words, he no longer writes poems for us that 
 charm by their pictorial and rhythmical beauty, but, 
 presenting modes of existence and feeling which are 
 either altogether inhuman or imperfectly human, 
 excite none of the interest that belongs to what re- 
 flects and interprets our own lives. Mermen, mer- 
 maids, sea fairies, Ladies of Shalott, Lotos Eaters, 
 disappear from the scene ; Adelines, Margarets, Elea- 
 nores, no longer come as abstract types of character 
 without speech, story, or personal relations, figured 
 forth in abundance of similes but with none of the 
 traits by which the mind apprehends individual men
 
 32 ESS ATS. 
 
 and women; Grecian nymphs no longer pour out 
 their loves and griefs to their mother earth, and 
 Grecian goddesses no longer interfere in the affairs 
 of mortals, and shed the lustre of celestial presences 
 on the mountain side. That in which we cannot 
 believe, either ceases to be treated at all, or is treated 
 as symbol and picture of what we know to be pro- 
 foundly real. So far is this change from necessitating 
 any narrowing of the poet's range of subjects, that 
 legendary history, fairy fiction, Greek poetry, and 
 trees endowed with human speech, blend in the pro- 
 cession with Egyptian fanatics, rapt nuns, English 
 ladies, peasant girls, artists, lawyers, farmers, in 
 fact, a tolerably complete representation of the mis- 
 cellaneous public of the present day ; while the forms 
 vary from epic fragments to the homeliest dialogue, 
 from the simplest utterance of emotion in a song to 
 the highest lyrical allegory of a terrible and profound 
 law of life. The poet looks upon a larger field than 
 before, and what he looked on before he now sees 
 with a more penetrating eye, a mind that appre- 
 hends wider and deeper relations. He paints more 
 brilliantly and forcibly than ever, but his pictures 
 speak to the heart and spirit as well as to the eye ; 
 his music is even richer and more charming in its 
 melody, but it moves henceforth fraught with the
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 33 
 
 feelings and ideas by which men and nations work 
 out the divine purposes of their being. In some 
 poems the artistic beauty seems given more for its 
 own sake than for any moral that lies in the story, 
 any ulterior meaning which it unfolds ; but the 
 noble pictures which the actions and persons of 
 human beings furnish are themselves Moral and In- 
 terpretation ; and in no poems more than in those 
 which simply present the splendour and beauty of 
 humanity, and of the material universe in which 
 humanity works its work, does the poet fulfil his 
 highest function. 
 
 The first poem in the Third Series is called The 
 JEpic, and contains a fragment on the death of King 
 Arthur, read to the party assembled in a country- 
 house at Christmas. Set thus amidst the fireside 
 talk of Christmas Eve, Morte d' Arthur ceases to be 
 a fragment of animated and picturesque epic story, 
 and becomes the answer of a Christian poet to the 
 querulous lamentation of the Christian ritualist and 
 dogmatist over the decay of faith. The noble huma- 
 nity and piety that shone in chivalry are not dead, 
 he tells us, with King Arthur, though 
 
 The sequel of to-day unsolders all 
 
 The goodliest fellowship of famous knights 
 
 Whereof this world holds record. 
 
 D
 
 34 ass ATS. 
 
 Excalibur, the mystic sword which Arthur wielded 
 so long and so well, vanishes with him from the 
 world, but the heavenly weapons wherewith men 
 fight the good fight are still bestowed upon the 
 heroes of the successive ages, differing in form and 
 temper, but effective for the various work, and fitted 
 to the hands that are to wield them. Not only 
 has each age its new work to do, its new in- 
 struments and new men to do it, as matter of 
 historical fact, but it must be so, 
 
 The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
 
 And God fulfils himself in many ways, 
 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 
 The Arthur of the round-table is gone to fable- 
 land; but the desire and hope that gave birth to 
 the legends of chivalry yet live, the dim prophecy 
 that he will one day return and rule over Britain 
 is ever accomplishing itself. What mean those 
 Christmas bells that tell us yearly Christ is born? 
 Do they lie ? No ! they blend with all noble legends 
 that speak of man's great deeds, of his vaster aspi- 
 rations, of his yet unaccomplished hopes. They 
 remind us of the prophecy to which fact is tending, 
 of the ideal after which the real is striving. To 
 him whose heart is hopeful and brave, who will 
 not be the slave of formulas, ( Arthur is come again,
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 35 
 
 and cannot die,' is the burden of the world's song ; 
 1 Come again, and thrice as fair,' is heard in every 
 change by which the thoughts of men are widened 
 and their hearts enlarged ; ' Come with all good 
 things, and war shall be no more,' the strain that 
 echoes clear in the distance, and most clear when 
 the church bells ring in the Christmas morn. Morte 
 d" Arthur is no mere story out of an old book, re- 
 furbished with modern ornaments, but a song of 
 hope, a prophecy of the final triumph of good. Mr. 
 Tennyson has, indeed, lavished upon the story all 
 the resources of a genius eminently pictorial, and 
 trained to complete mastery over language and metre. 
 He might unquestionably have silenced the parson 
 in a more simple and direct fashion, by which he 
 would not only have deprived us of a noble piece 
 of painting, but have missed a poetic and profoundly 
 true method of looking at national legends. The 
 poem justifies itself, by its finished excellence, as a 
 work of art, but it is spiritualized and raised above 
 merely pictorial and dramatic beauty by its setting, 
 and the poet's nineteenth-century point of view. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson makes the supposed author, Eve- 
 rard Hall, talk of his fragment as 
 
 Faint Homeric echoes, nothing worth, 
 Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt. 
 
 D2
 
 36 USSAYS. 
 
 They are rather Virgilian than Homeric echoes ; 
 elaborate and stately, not naive and eager to tell 
 their story ; rich in pictorial detail ; carefully studied ; 
 conscious of their own art ; more anxious for beauty 
 of workmanship than interest of action. But since 
 John Dry den died, no English poet has written 
 verse so noble, so sonorous, of such sustained majesty 
 and might; no English poet has brought pictures 
 so clear and splendid before the eye by the power 
 of single epithets and phrases; and Dryden himself 
 never wrote a poem so free from careless lines, un- 
 meaning words, and conventional epithets. The 
 fragment bursts upon us like the blended blast and 
 wail of the trumpets of pursuing and retreating 
 hosts : a whole day's alternate victory and defeat, 
 a series of single combats, the death of the leaders 
 one by one, the drawing off of the armies at sunset, 
 King Arthur alone and wounded on the field, the 
 coming on of night and the rising of the moon, the 
 approach of King Arthur's last captain to bear him 
 to a place of shelter, are pictured to the imagina- 
 tion in the few vigorous lines that commence the 
 poem. 
 
 So all day long the noise of battle rolled 
 Among the mountains by the winter sea; 
 Until King Arthur's table, man by man, 
 Had fall'n in Lyonness about their Lord,
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 37 
 
 King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep, 
 The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, 
 Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights, 
 And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, 
 A broken chancel with a broken cross, 
 That stood on a dark strait of barren land. 
 On one side lay the ocean, and on one 
 Lay a great water, and the moon was full. 
 
 That phrase, l a great water,' has probably often been 
 ridiculed as affected phraseology for ' a great lake ' ; 
 but it is an instance of the intense presentative 
 power of Mr. Tennyson's genius. It precisely marks 
 the appearance of a large lake outspread and taken 
 in at one glance from a high ground. Had ' a 
 great lake ' been substituted for it, the phrase would 
 have needed to be translated by the mind into water 
 of a certain shape and size, before the picture was 
 realized by the imagination. l A great lake is, in 
 fact, one degree removed from the sensuous to the 
 logical, from the individual appearance to the ge- 
 neric name, and is therefore less poetic and pictorial. 
 
 With what distinctness, with what force and 
 conciseness of language, is the whole scene of the 
 churchyard, with its associations, brought before the 
 mind: its ancestral relics, the ruins of the chapel, 
 the piercing cold of the night-wind edged with sea- 
 salt, the sharp rocks down which the path to the 
 lake descends :
 
 38 ESSAYS. 
 
 So saying, from the ruined shrine he stept, 
 And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, 
 Where lay the mighty hones of ancient men, 
 Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang 
 Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down, 
 By zig-zag paths, and juts of pointed rock, 
 Came on the shining levels of the lake. 
 
 The classical cequora may have suggested the ' shin- 
 ing levels' ; but there is a deeper reason for the 
 change of phrase, for the ( great water,' as seen from 
 the high ground, becomes a series of flashing surfaces 
 when Sir Bedivere looks along it from its margin. 
 This pictorial reality is kept up through the 
 poem. Excalibur does not merely sparkle in the 
 moonlight with its jewelled hilt, but 
 
 The winter moon, 
 
 Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth 
 And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt. 
 
 Sir Bedivere does not doubt whether he shall throw 
 the sword, but stands 
 
 This way and that, dividing the swift mind, 
 In act to throw. 
 
 None the worse a phrase for recalling the Virgilian 
 1 Atque animum mine hue celerem mine dividit illuc.' 
 The 'many-knotted waterflags' are not brought in 
 simply to hide Excalibur, they must add their life 
 to the picture, and 
 
 Whistle stiff and dry ahout the marge.
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 39 
 
 Everywhere the phenomenon is presented with the 
 utmost vividness and truth of appearance, with the 
 utmost fulness of sense-impressing qualities ; sen- 
 suous concrete language takes the place of our com- 
 mon speech, abounding in logical generalizations 
 and names of classes. The mind is kept awake and 
 in full activity by the presence of those realities 
 which are smothered and hidden by the conventional 
 symbols through which ordinary narrative is carried 
 on. The most delicate distinctions of phenomena 
 are noted that serve as an aid to our complete rea- 
 lization of the scene. Sir Bedivere hears 
 
 The ripple washing in the reeds, 
 
 and 
 
 The wild water lapping on the crags ; 
 
 the two phrases marking exactly the difference of 
 sound produced by water swelling up against a per- 
 meable or impermeable barrier. 
 
 How thoroughly Shakspearian is King Arthur's 
 
 lament, 
 
 Woe is me ! 
 
 Authority forgets a dying king, 
 Laid widowed of the power in his eye 
 That bowed the will, 
 
 where the personification assists the imagination 
 without distressing the understanding, as when dwelt 
 upon, and expanded in detail ; deepening the im- 
 pressiveness of the sentiment by giving along with
 
 40 ESSAYS. 
 
 a true thought a grand picture, -just such a passing 
 flash of impassioned rhetoric as would become the 
 highest oratory, and thrill through the hearts of a 
 great assembly. 
 
 In the description of Sir Bedivere's last and 
 successful attempt to throw the sword into the lake, 
 every word tells of rapid, agitated, determined action, 
 refusing to dally with the temptation that had twice 
 overcome him : 
 
 Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran 
 
 And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged 
 
 Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch' d the sword, 
 
 And strongly wheel' d and threw it. The great brand 
 
 Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, 
 
 And flashing round and round, and whirl' d in an arch, 
 
 Shot like a streamer of the northern morn 
 
 Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 
 
 By night, with noises of the northern sea. 
 
 So flash' d and fell the brand Excalibur. 
 
 A series of brilliant effects is hit off in those 
 two words, l made lightnings.' ' Whirl'd in an arch,' 
 is a splendid instance of sound answering to sense, 
 which the older critics made so much of; the addi- 
 tional syllable which breaks the measure, and neces- 
 sitates an increased rapidity of utterance, seeming 
 to express to the ear the rush of the sword up its 
 parabolic curve. And with what lavish richness of 
 presentative power is the boreal aurora, the collision,
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 41 
 
 the crash, and the thunder of the meeting icebergs, 
 brought before the eye. An inferior artist would 
 have shouted through a page, and emptied a whole 
 pallet of colour, without any result but interrupting 
 his narrative, where Tennyson in three lines strik- 
 ingly illustrates the fact he has to tell, associates 
 it impressively with one of nature's grandest pheno- 
 _mena, and gives a complete picture of this pheno- 
 menon besides. 
 
 How dramatic and striking is King Arthur's 
 sudden exclamation on Sir Bedivere's return : 
 
 Now see I by thine eyes that this is done ; 
 
 how wonderfully true of a dying man, the 
 
 Looking wistfully, with wide blue eye, 
 As in a picture; 
 
 how pictorial and minutely attentive to the facts of 
 appearance, 
 
 But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, 
 Clothed with his breath, and looking as he walked 
 Larger than human on the frozen hills; 
 
 how rapid and eager the haste of movement in reply 
 to the King's 'Quick, quick!' 
 
 He heard the deep behind him, and a cry 
 Before. His own thought drove him like a goad. 
 Dry clash' d his harness in the icy caves 
 And barren chasms, and all to left and right 
 The bare black cliff clang' d round him, as he based 
 His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang 
 Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels ;
 
 42 ESSAYS. 
 
 do we not seem to burst from the narrow steep path 
 down the ravine, whose tall precipitous sides hide 
 the sky and the broad landscape from sight, and 
 come out in a moment upon 
 
 The level lake 
 And the long glories of the winter moon ? 
 
 In some over-fastidious moods, one might be inclined 
 to charge 
 
 A cry that shivered to the tingling stars 
 
 with a touch of that exaggeration which belongs to 
 the ' spasmodic school ' ; but the cry comes from 
 a company of spirits, amid mountains whose natural 
 power of echo is heightened by the silence of night, 
 the clearness of the winter air, and the hardening 
 effect of frost. Such a cry at such a time, and in 
 such a place, would thrill from rock to rock, from 
 summit to summit, till it seemed to pierce the sky 
 in a hurtling storm of multitudinous arrowy sounds, 
 and die away in infinitely distant pulsations among 
 the stars. In the following lines, where the agony 
 of lamentation is compared to 
 
 A wind that shrills 
 
 All night in a waste land, where no one comes, 
 Or hath come since t/ie making of the world, 
 
 the passage italicised may seem at first to add 
 nothing to the force of the comparison, as the shrill-
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 43 
 
 ness of the wind would not be greater in an unin- 
 habited place than anywhere else in open ground. 
 But the mournfulness of the feeling a man would 
 experience in such a place, from the sense of utter 
 isolation and sterility, is blended with the naturally 
 sad wail of the wind over a wide waste, and the 
 addition thus becomes no mere completion of a 
 thought of which only part is wanted for the illus- 
 tration though that were allowable enough, accord- 
 ing to ordinary poetic usage, but gives a heightening 
 of sentiment without which the illustration itself 
 would be incomplete and less impressive. 
 
 Magnificent similes do not make poetry, but they 
 are among its most effective means of filling the 
 mind of the reader with the actual grandeur and 
 pathos of the particular scene presented. Where 
 the poet seizes not upon some mere superficial re- 
 semblance that draws the fancy between two objects 
 essentially different in the general feeling they excite, 
 but brings in a phenomenon of nature which excites 
 feelings analogous to those belonging to the event 
 or scene he is narrating, the use of simile and figure 
 not only enables him to avoid encumbering his 
 narrative by detail, and epithet, and general terms 
 otherwise necessary to bring his object before the 
 mind, but associates that object at once and spon-
 
 44 ESSAYS. 
 
 taneously with the feelings "belonging to the illus- 
 trating phenomenon an effect which could not be 
 produced apart from this device except by long 
 drawn-out reflections. Simile and figure may be 
 regarded as a natural short-hand, which substitutes 
 well-known things for the unknown qualities of 
 whatever has to be described, and which therefore 
 gives the general effect of the things to be described 
 without necessitating the task of minute description. 
 This is exactly the reverse of the use made of these 
 forms of speech by the man of wit, who intentionally 
 selects for his illustration some merely accidental 
 and often merely verbal resemblance between two 
 things essentially different in themselves and in the 
 feelings they excite. But the poet, in his impas- 
 sioned or serious moods, seizes not on resemblances 
 but true analogies ; and they at once adorn his poetry 
 with impressive pictures, and convey his meaning 
 with force and brevity. The passage in which 
 Arthur is described as dying in the arms of the 
 mourning queen, is a fine instance of a poetical use 
 of simile and figure. The moon fading in the early 
 morning, the dazzling brightness of the rising sun, 
 the shattered column, the glancing flight of a shoot- 
 ing star, bring before the mind not only the dying 
 king, pale and bleeding, but the contrast between
 
 TEXNTSON'S POEMS. 45 
 
 his present weakness and the glory and triumphs 
 of his chivalrous and brilliant life. In a few lines 
 his whole story is told: it is not merely a dying 
 warrior who lies before us, but the strength, the 
 state, the splendour, and enjoyment of his past life, 
 flash before the imagination, and deepen the sadness 
 and humiliation of his defeat and death. 
 
 For all his face was white 
 And colourless, and like the wither" d moon 
 Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east ; 
 And all his greaves and cuisses dash'd with drops 
 Of onset ; and the light and lustrous curls 
 That made his forehead like a rising sun 
 High from the dais-throne were parch' d with dust; 
 Or, clotted into points and hanging loose, 
 Mix'd with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. 
 So like a shattered column lay the king; 
 Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest, 
 From spur to plume a star of tournament, 
 Shot through the lists at Camelot, and charged 
 Before the eyes of ladies and of kings. 
 
 Let not the purpose of this analysis of detail 
 be misunderstood. Fine phrases and fine passages 
 do not make a fine poem ; but they do show that 
 unflagging activity of imagination, which operating 
 on a finely-constructed whole, change a well-propor- 
 tioned framework into a temple of carved stones, 
 every one of which is instinct with life and thought, 
 where not only the coup d'ceil strikes, but the closest
 
 46 JESS AYS. 
 
 and most minute examination only opens fresh 
 sources of wonder and enjoyment. In many poems 
 that possess merit equal to Morte cF Arthur, it would 
 be impossible to pick out single passages or lines 
 that would be beautiful or striking, when taken 
 from their context. Dora is an instance. But this 
 examination of details proves that where Mr. Tenny- 
 son is employed upon a poem which consists of 
 a series of actions admitting of splendid pictorial 
 presentment, being in their own nature pictorially 
 splendid, his pictures are drawn with a vigorous 
 hand, and coloured to the life ; and that no stroke 
 of his brush is without meaning. And this has 
 been done, not because it is supposed that professed 
 admirers of Mr. Tennyson's poetry needed help to 
 point out the just grounds of their admiration, but 
 because many persons say they cannot see why 
 others do so highly admire Mr. Tennyson; and to 
 show them that a hasty, careless glance over his 
 verses such as they give to a leader in a newspaper, 
 or even less attentive and interested, is not pre- 
 cisely the way to arrive at the enjoyment of a poet 
 in whom every word is the result of intense activity 
 and concentration of the imagination, controlled by 
 cultivated taste, and trained to a rare mastery over 
 language and metre.
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 47 
 
 The group of poems founded on legendary history, 
 of which Morte d" 1 Arthur is the most important, 
 consists, besides, of Godiva, St. Simeon Stylites, 
 Ulysses, St. Agnes, and Sir Galahad. Godiva 
 would have yielded to analysis results similar to 
 those we have obtained from Morte d? Arthur, re- 
 sembling that poem in pictorial beauty and vivid 
 dramatic presentation. A virginal purity, a spirit 
 of chivalrous reverence for womanhood and self- 
 sacrifice, veils and softens as with a halo of glory 
 the figure of the l woman of a thousand summers 
 back,' as 'she rode forth clothed on with chastity.' 
 Though compelled to pass the poem without notice 
 of its details, we cannot but direct the attention of 
 our readers to the intense imaginative reality of 
 that passage in which the feelings of Godiva, as 
 she rides through the streets, are transferred to the 
 material objects by which she is surrounded: 
 
 The deep air listened round her as she rode, 
 And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear. 
 The little wide-mouthed heads upon the spout 
 Had cunning eyes to see, &c. 
 
 And again in the same spirit, subordinating the truth 
 of literal fact to the higher dramatic truth of passion : 
 
 And all at once, 
 
 "With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon 
 Was clash'd and hammer'd from a hundred towers, 
 One after one.
 
 48 ESSAYS. 
 
 The other four poems of the group aim at pre- 
 senting types of character, and not at narrative of 
 action. They take the form of speeches uttered on 
 occasions which adequately represent the essential 
 characteristics of the life of the speaker. The habitual 
 selection of this form by Mr. Tennyson is one among 
 many indications of the intensity of his imagination. 
 It enables him to present in the shortest compass the 
 essentials of his subject without the intervention of 
 any commonplace machinery, but it makes a demand 
 upon the imaginative resources of his readers, which 
 goes some way to explain why many persons who 
 enjoy certain kinds of poetry are utterly unable to 
 appreciate his. Each of these four poems contains 
 implicitly the story of a life and the exhibition of 
 a well-marked type of character. We cannot pause 
 to dwell upon the force and truth of the drawing in 
 each case, but the group is important, as indicating 
 the versatility of Mr. Tennyson's genius, his catho- 
 licity of imaginative apprehension, and his command 
 over the elements of the most widely differing cha- 
 racters. St. Simeon Stylites proves that it is from 
 no want of power to paint the horrible and the gro- 
 tesque that Mr. Tennyson abstains as a rule from 
 such subjects. And St. Agnes is the more remarkable 
 as showing a hearty appreciation of the purer form of
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 49 
 
 asceticism in a poet whose characteristic excellence 
 lies in the portrayal of tender sentiment and volup- 
 tuous passion, upheld and refined by a stainless purity. 
 
 We pass on to the love-poems, and in them we 
 find the same variety of treatment, the same avoidance 
 of repetition, just noticed in the legendary group. 
 
 The Gardener's Daughter, with its rich luxuriance 
 of imagery, its warmth of passion, its magnificence 
 of phrase, its abandon of sentiment, is not more es- 
 sentially different from the severely dramatic simpli- 
 city and pathos of Dora, than the calm retrospect and 
 peaceful affection of The Miller's Daughter is from 
 the stormy current of slighted passion and fierce 
 scorn that rushes wildly on through Locksley Hall, 
 to find its haven in grand visions of progress and 
 the excitement of enterprise. The playful fancy of 
 The Talking Oak touches the airy treble of a scale 
 of which Love and Duty sound the deepest and 
 most solemn chords. The rustic grace and sweet- 
 ness of The May Queen contrast sharply with the 
 rude force and indignant sarcasm of Lady Clara 
 Vere de Vere ; while the conversational idylls blend 
 with the level tones of ordinary conversation touches 
 of natural beauty and flashes of elevated thought, 
 which raise them to the rank of poems, and recal 
 what are among the happier hours of our modern 
 
 E
 
 50 US SATS. 
 
 life, those hours with cultivated and genial friends, 
 in which the cares of the world are shaken off, and 
 the best memories of the past, the noblest aspira- 
 tions, the gentlest feelings, revive amid mountain 
 and lake, for the votaries of ambition, science, or 
 business. 
 
 Then, as to form, we find narrative, dialogue, 
 soliloquy, and direct address. We have blank verse 
 that ranges through all the scale of feeling, from 
 the exquisitely rhythmical, full, majestic, down to 
 the just accented strain, that may fairly represent 
 genial and animated conversation ; we have lyric 
 measures that flow softly on like a quiet streamlet, 
 as in the Millers Daughter; go straight and fierce 
 to their mark like arrows of scorn, as in Lady Clara 
 Vere de Vere ; float gaily or sadly on in sweet 
 calm to the music of a young girl's life and early 
 death, as in the three strains of The May Queen; 
 dash on in thunder and in storm, sweeping vast 
 spaces, gathering in lurid gloom, or clearing in 
 sudden flashes, impetuous hurricane of thick clouds, 
 or dazzling brightness of tropic summer, as in Locksley 
 Hall. No poet but Goethe has, in our day, swept 
 a lyre of such varied range, with so perfect a com- 
 mand of every key. Moreover, none of these poems 
 belong to the class called 'occasional.' They all
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 51 
 
 have a construction which tells a complete story 
 often the story of a life. Some touch, frequently- 
 slight, lets us into the previous stages of the per- 
 sonal history, and throws forward a clear light upon 
 the future career. The passions are treated, not 
 merely as giving rise to striking incidents, but as 
 exercising a permanent influence on the character 
 and destiny. Though for the most part lyrical in 
 form, the poems rise, thus, to the full significance 
 of dramas, as has been explained in respect to The 
 Millers Daughter ; and similar remarks might be 
 truly applied to all the principal poems. These 
 qualities of variety and completeness give Mr. Tenny- 
 son a claim to a place among great poets, which 
 the form and length of his compositions somewhat 
 interfere with in the first rough estimate of a public 
 inclined to set ( the how much before the how. ' 
 We can only indicate them by selected instances; 
 but the careful analysis of any one of his poems 
 would lead to the same conclusions. 
 
 The love story to which The Gardener's Daughter 
 supplies a title and a central figure, takes the form of 
 a narrative from the lips of the man who wooed 
 and won the maiden for a wife. By this selection 
 of a speaker, who is made to dwell on the blissful 
 recollections of early love, the dramatic colouring 
 E2
 
 52 JESSAYS. 
 
 throughout is maintained at a glowing tone, without 
 being exposed to the charge of exaggeration. The 
 minutest incidents, the changing lights and shades 
 of feeling, belonging to such a period, are stamped 
 indelibly in the memory, and never lose their first 
 fresh charm and interest. To raise the colouring 
 still higher, and justify a more elaborately picturesque 
 treatment, a fonder dwelling upon every detail of 
 natural beauty then noted with the seeing eye of 
 a loving heart, the speaker is not only a lover, but 
 a painter. The motive is thus admirably chosen for 
 treatment at once impassioned and pictorial, for the 
 minutest detail of feeling and circumstance, for the 
 freest play of an imaginative sympathy with nature, 
 and the rich hues that inward joy sheds over the 
 outward world. But Mr. Tennyson is the last man 
 to forget that law of reserve which binds the lover 
 the law which a recent writer has so well expressed, 
 when he says 
 
 Not to unveil before the gaze 
 
 Of an imperfect sympathy, 
 In aught -we are, is the sweet praise 
 
 And the main sum of modesty. 
 Love blabbed of is a great decline ; 
 
 A careless world unsanctions sense; 
 But he who casts heaven's truth to swine 
 
 Consummates all incontinence.* 
 
 * The Angel in the Hottse.
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 53 
 
 The rapture delineated in The Gardener's Daughter 
 is the rapture of hope when the eyes and heart first 
 feel the loveliness of a woman, and all nature shines 
 in the wedding-garment, which is but the reflection 
 of the lover's inward life. No babbling of lover's 
 secrets is here ; no laying bare to a third person of 
 what is perfectly befitting, graceful, beautiful, and 
 pure when done and said at love's instinctive bidding, 
 but becomes the contrary of these when spoken of 
 to others, or dwelt on in cool, reflective moments. 
 The highest emotion is sacred, only revealed to the 
 most perfect sympathy that of the person who 
 excites and shares it; and even that revelation must 
 be inarticulate, of act, of look not of speech. There 
 is profound beauty and truth in the allegory that 
 represents love as a blind child ; he knows no wrong, 
 is unconscious of what he does, trusting to a divine 
 instinct. The speaker in The Gardener's Daughter 
 holds fast to this law. He paints the courtship, not 
 the marriage; speaks of his heart's idol as the star 
 that shone upon his course, the sun that lighted his 
 day; as the goddess, ere yet she stepped from her 
 ambrosial cloud-pedestal, and blessed his life with 
 joys too sacred for the common ear. It is the beauty 
 that he wooed, not the wife that he won, that he 
 unveils for the listener to his tale. And as if even
 
 54 us SATS. 
 
 this were too much, as if it were a kind of pro- 
 fanation to utter even these preludes of a life-blessed- 
 ness to one who might, the moment after, look upon 
 the actual woman who was their object, the speaker 
 tells us that she has passed from earth and mortal 
 taint, that no second love has confused her image ; 
 but long years of lonely widowhood have only 
 softened and hallowed it in his heart. As he speaks, 
 he is standing before her veiled portrait, and, raising 
 the veil, he says 
 
 Behold her there, 
 
 Aa I beheld her ere she knew my heart, 
 My first, last love ; the idol of my youth, 
 The darling of my manhood, and alas ! 
 Now the most blessed memory of mine age. 
 
 And thus, by this slight touch, what would have 
 been merely a charmingly told love story, becomes, 
 in fact, a story of a life sustained by love to the 
 end, as it was in its youth brightened and enriched 
 by love. The single phase of passion and of fortune 
 is not only worked out to its crisis, so as to satisfy 
 the artistic sense of completeness, but the value 
 and influence of that single phase is shown as spread- 
 ing through to the end of life, and the feeling that 
 demands an eternal meaning and purpose in each 
 stage of life is fully satisfied. 
 
 It would be impossible in any notice of Mr.
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS- 55 
 
 Tennyson to be satisfied with a survey of the plan 
 of what may fairly be called his most popular poem. 
 He, indeed, constructs his poems poetically, and 
 certainly cannot be ranked with the mere exquisite 
 worker of detail; but all his detail is so exquisite 
 in his finer poems, that it would be as hopeless to 
 attempt to convey a true impression of them without 
 exhibiting this detail in characteristic passages, as 
 it would be to make a person feel all the subtle 
 and penetrating grace and sweetness of a Raffaelle 
 Madonna by description, or to transfuse into words 
 the glory and power of Titian's colours. After all 
 that philosophical critics have talked of organic unity, 
 and such-like hard phrases, since Coleridge influenced 
 English criticism, and allowing all the importance 
 that belongs to the facts expressed, or intended to be 
 expressed, by the phrases, it must be admitted that 
 the finest construction would produce little effect in 
 poetry without fine details; and that where the 
 genius for producing these exists, the art or instinct 
 which combines them will seldom be wanting when 
 the poet is mature. The real truth is, that what 
 is often called fine detail is nothing but tawdry orna- 
 ment, the feeble or vehement effort to say fine 
 things without having fine thoughts, to utter raptures 
 that are insincere and unreal, inasmuch as the imagi-
 
 56 JESSATS. 
 
 native power to summon up the beautiful objects 
 supposed to justify the rapture is wanting, and the 
 would-be poet has before him merely the general 
 conceptions of beautiful objects, to which he applies, 
 consequently, mere general conventional phrases. 
 Mr. Tennyson's phrases, on the contrary, are pictures ; 
 and his rhythm the natural music of a mind rejoicing 
 in the beauty of the pictures that flow in ordered 
 continuity and fulness before him. The unflagging 
 activity of this pictorial power is manifested fre- 
 quently in Mr. Tennyson's poems, by the slightest 
 change from the ordinary phrase, as has been noticed 
 in Morte d' Arthur. Here, again, in The Gardener's 
 Daughter, 
 
 My Eustace might have sat for Hercules 
 So muscular he spread, so troad of breast, 
 
 where the spread gives not the mere statement of 
 a fact, but its actual appearance ; the space fills before 
 the eye with the bulky frame of the man, as we 
 look. 
 
 In describing the locality of the garden, Mr. 
 Tennyson fills the mind with the realites of the 
 place. We know the distance from the city by 
 hearing the funeral and marriage bells and the clang- 
 ing of the minster clock, borne upon the wind ; by 
 looking out along a league of grass. The nature
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 57 
 
 of the countiy and the time of year are given in the 
 slow, broad stream, with its floating lilies, its pleasure 
 skiffs, and its barges ; in the rich grass meadows with 
 their pasturing cattle, and their low-hanging lime 
 trees in flower, humming with winged life. And 
 to complete the picture thus presented, the extreme 
 distance is filled by the three-arched bridge, with the 
 minster-towers rising above it 
 
 Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
 Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love. 
 News from the humming city comes to it 
 In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; 
 And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
 The windy clanging of the minster clock; 
 Although between it and the garden lies 
 A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream, 
 That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar, 
 "Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on, 
 Barge -laden, to three arches of a bridge 
 Crown'd with the minster-towers. 
 
 The fields between 
 
 Are dewy-fresh, brows' d by deep-udder' d kine, 
 And all about the large lime feathers low, 
 The lime a summer home of murmurous wings. 
 
 A landscape by Constable or De Wint would not 
 bring the scene more clearly before the eye, or with 
 more of the quiet truth of happy, but unimpassioned 
 observation. But it is the high prerogative of poetry 
 that she can throw over nature the ' wedding-garment 
 or the shroud,' and exhibit landscape as it is coloured
 
 58 ESSAYS. 
 
 by emotion. It would be rash to assert perfection 
 of anything human; but the following description 
 of a country walk on a May morning, under the 
 influence of the premonition of a first passion, before 
 the subjective excitement is determined to and con- 
 centrated upon its proper object, approaches that 
 limit. Since 
 
 Adam first 
 Embraced his Eve, in happy hour, 
 
 love was ever the great ideal artist, at whose touch 
 
 Every bird of Eden burst 
 In carol, every bud in flower; 
 
 but he never painted a more glowing picture of 
 a mind full of the bliss that is half-sister to desire, 
 or of a nature reflecting the bliss in a thousand 
 beautiful sights and sounds than this : 
 
 And sure this orbit of the memory folds 
 For ever in itself the day we went 
 To see her. All the land in flowery squares, 
 Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind, 
 Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud 
 Drew downward : but all else of Heaven was pure 
 Up to the Sun, and May from verge to verge, 
 And May with me from head to heel. And now, 
 As though 'twere yesterday, as though it were 
 The hour just flown, that morn with all its sound, 
 (For those old Mays had thrice the life of these,) 
 Rings in mine ears. The steer forgot to graze, 
 And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood,
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 59 
 
 Leaning his horns into the neighbour field, 
 
 And lowing to his fellows. From the woods 
 
 Came voices of the well-contented doves, 
 
 The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy, 
 
 But shook his song together as he near'd 
 
 His happy home, the ground. To left and right, 
 
 The cuckoo told his name to all the hills; 
 
 The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm ; 
 
 The redcap whistled ; and the nightingale 
 
 Sang loud, as though he were the bird of day. 
 
 We have minute touches, bringing out common 
 objects with a passing glory that catches without 
 chaining the attention, as well as those finished 
 pictures upon which the mind dwells with a fixed 
 delight of contemplation ; touches that charm us 
 with their truth, and help to mark the whole scene 
 in its distinction of season and weather. Here are 
 two from a crowd of such. From the lilac in 
 crowded bloom 
 
 One warm gust, full-fed with perfume, blew 
 Beyond us, as we entered in the cool. 
 
 ***** 
 
 In the midst 
 
 A cedar spread his dark-green layer of shade. 
 The garden glasses shone, and momently 
 The twinkling laurels scattered silver lights; 
 
 where the epithet silver admirably expresses the 
 metallic glitter of the laurel leaves in the sun, com- 
 pared with the deader green of ordinary foliage. 
 
 1 The last night's gale/ which had blown the
 
 60 ESSAYS. 
 
 rose-tree across the walk, may have been introduced 
 mainly to give Rose a graceful occupation, and to 
 justify a charming picture. But even if that were 
 its main purpose, it no less contributes a fact which 
 accounts for the marvellous transparency of the May 
 morning, the clearness of the atmosphere shedding 
 rapture through the veins and hearts of all living 
 things. Applied to most poets, such an observation 
 would savour of over-refining, but Tennyson's never- 
 aimless minuteness justifies it. 
 
 In the picture of Rose which follows, Mr. Tenny- 
 son has, with the true instinct of genius, avoided 
 attempting to paint in words a beautiful human face, 
 while he preserves dramatic propriety in not making 
 a lover at the first glance master the expression of 
 the countenance he afterwards knows in all its 
 meanings. The painter-lover would be at once at- 
 tracted to the picturesque attitude, general effect of 
 dress, light and shade, the contour of the figure, and 
 the bright points of colour 
 
 One arm aloft, 
 
 Gown'd in pure white, that fitted to the shape 
 Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood. 
 A single stream of all her soft brown hair 
 Poured on one side : the shadow of the flowers 
 Stole all the golden gloss, and, wavering 
 Lovingly lower, trembled on her waist 
 Ah, happy shade and still went wavering down,
 
 TUNNYSON'S POEMS. 61 
 
 But, ere it touch' d a foot, that might have danced 
 The greensward into greener circles, dipt, 
 And mix'd with shadows of the common ground! 
 But the full day dwelt on her brows, and sunn'd 
 Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe-bloom, 
 And doubled his own warmth against her lips, 
 And on the bounteous wave of such a breast 
 As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade, 
 She stood, a sight to make an old man young. 
 
 With what exquisite feeling is the progress of 
 the love associated with the imagery of the garden 
 in which the loved one ' hoarded in herself, grew, 
 seldom seen,' 
 
 The daughters of the year, 
 One after one, thro' that still garden passed : 
 Each garlanded with her peculiar flower 
 Danced into light, and died into the shade; 
 And each in passing touch' d with some new grace 
 Or seem'd to touch her, so that day by day, 
 Like one that never can be wholly known, 
 Her beauty grew ; 
 
 and in that line, ' like one that never can be wholly 
 known,' is revealed one exhaustless charm in all 
 our true personal relations. Things, as things, soon 
 weary us, because we soon know all we can ever 
 know about them ; persons are ever new, ever un- 
 folding to us something unexpected, as they become 
 dearer to us, and we look at them with eyes opened 
 by sympathy and affection. Only the view of the 
 universe, as a revelation of a personal being, supplies 
 to outward objects exhaustless variety and interest.
 
 62 ESSAYS. 
 
 The law of reserve which rules this poem has 
 been already alluded to. It requires neither art nor 
 genius to raise emotion of a low kind in a reader, 
 if a writer has no reserve. The mind is sufficiently 
 awake in all of us to realize pictures that appeal 
 to the sensual passions; and a writer has no more 
 difficulty in being powerful, if he give himself the 
 licence of some poetry, than he has in being witty, 
 if he copy Swift's unbridled profanity and beastliness. 
 Mr. Tennyson's glory is to have portrayed passion 
 with a feminine purity, to have spiritualized the 
 voluptuousness of the senses and the imagination 
 by a manly reverence for woman's worth, and a 
 clear intuition of ' the perfect law of liberty ' through 
 which the true humanity develops itself in the form 
 and condition of an animal nature. He religiously 
 observes the sanctities of love, and in graceful pictures 
 lays down the law which he respects : 
 
 "Would you learn at full 
 How passion rose thro' circumstantial grades 
 Beyond all grades develop' d ? and indeed 
 I had not staid so long to tell you all, 
 But while I mused came Memory with sad eyes, 
 Holding the folded annals of my youth; 
 And while I mused, Love with knit trows went by, 
 And with a flying finger swept my lips, 
 And spake, ' Be wise : not easily forgiven 
 Are those, who setting wide the doors, that har 
 The secret bridal chambers of the heart, 
 Let in the day.' Here, then, my words have end.
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 63 
 
 And here must end our remarks upon The 
 Gardener's Daughter. We can remember no love 
 story that can be placed beside it in all its har- 
 monious combination of excellences. Passion may 
 have been dramatised more intensely; a subtle 
 grace of sentiment, a charm of evanescent fra- 
 grance, may be felt more in some of Shelley's 
 lyrics, and in some of Mr. Tennyson's own; cha- 
 racter may certainly be given with more force of 
 individuality; and unquestionably a story more ex- 
 citing in its incidents has often been told by 
 novelist and poet: but for its delineation of the 
 first and last love of a happy man, whose moral 
 nature has known nothing of conflicts with itself, 
 and whose mind has been kept healthy by the 
 delightful occupation of the painter; for its vivid 
 descriptions of nature in some of her loveliest aspects ; 
 for the sense of perfect enjoyment that makes the 
 verse flow on as a full stream through a rich meadow- 
 land, and for the touching softening of the tone as 
 the speaker tells of the present as a calm resting- 
 place between a blessed memory and a blessed hope, 
 it stands unrivalled in English literature. And yet 
 it never deviates from the familiar path of our English 
 daily life, and is just a simple picture of that life 
 as a joyous heart and warm affection may make it for 
 any of us.
 
 64 ESSAYS. 
 
 The forms of poetry which Mr. Tennyson adopts 
 are not capable of interpreting the more complex 
 moral phenomena. To show that evil natures and 
 evil actions have their appointed work in the world, 
 
 That somehow good 
 Will be the final goal of ill, 
 To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
 Defects of doubt and taints of blood, 
 
 will, in most cases, require a more complex machinery 
 of interacting events and characters than he puts 
 in operation. Beautiful actions and beautiful cha- 
 racters are their own interpretation. We need ask 
 no questions as to the motive and ground of their 
 existence, as to the part they bear in the harmonies 
 of the universe. But to throw the faintest light 
 of hope upon the lives and destinies of men and 
 women who seem to be born only to cause suffering 
 to themselves and others, to grow worse as they 
 grow older, and to harden under the discipline of 
 the moral laws of the universe, the mind must 
 look far back into the determining causes of cha- 
 racter and action, far forward into their remote 
 results, and far round upon the society in which 
 they develop themselves, and upon which they are 
 exerting a constant modifying power, through its 
 interests and sympathies. Even the widest glance 
 forward, backward, and around, will fail often to
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 65 
 
 detect one clue to the mystery of evil; and faith 
 can only throw herself 
 
 Upon the great world's altar stairs, 
 That slope through darkness up to God. 
 
 So far, however, as the problem can "be solved 
 poetically by exhibiting, that is, the real relations 
 of good and evil in particular cases, and their actual 
 connexion with each other as cause and effect, so 
 as to vindicate at once the eternal law of right 
 and the goodness of God with sufficient clearness 
 to justify the expression of the poet's view of the 
 world in a rhythmical form, the drama or the epic 
 will alone satisfy the necessities of the case. The 
 lyric poet may indeed assert in glowing strains his 
 own conviction of the ultimate solution as a general 
 truth, or he may present his view of the working 
 of any great moral laws in lyric allegories, like 
 The Palace of Art or The Vision of Sin : but no 
 machinery short of the drama or epic will enable 
 him to solve practically, and to the conviction of 
 his readers, the darker problems of human life. And 
 Mr. Tennyson abstains, as a rule, from touching 
 any actions of human beings that are not, so to 
 speak, their own vindication, and which do not 
 at once commend themselves to the sympathy and 
 conscience by their own gracefulness, beauty, or 
 
 F
 
 66 
 
 nobility, the happiness, the gentleness, the vitality 
 of mind and heart, the strength and courage of 
 will they exhibit. 
 
 This, however, in a world where suffering and 
 sorrow are among the appointed means of discipline 
 for the good as well as among the punishments of 
 the bad, leaves still scope enough for poetry of a 
 severer character than the exquisite and happy love- 
 story we have been commenting upon. In Dora and 
 Love and Duty the problem the poet attempts to solve 
 is not to show how the eternal law of right vindicates 
 itself against man's self-will and self-indulgence, but 
 how the goodness of God vindicates itself against 
 man's self-sacrifice in behalf of the right. If such 
 vindication were impossible in the typical instances 
 selected, the subjects would be unfit for poetic treat- 
 ment. Suffering, unredeemed by its effects, may 
 be a proper subject for the awe-struck meditations 
 of any man; but to represent it under rhythmical 
 forms which are symbolical of emotion flowing mu- 
 sically forth from a heart rejoicing in its own thoughts 
 about the objects present to it, would be just mockery. 
 It is only Nero that fiddles when Rome is burning. 
 The true poet must have seen the final issue in good 
 of the struggle he portrays, even though but in 
 a faint and hazy glimpse. And Mr. Tennyson
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 67 
 
 habitually observes this law. Even poor, perverted 
 Simeon Stylites has glimpses of his mistake; his 
 wretched, addled brain is clouded, but the poem 
 closes with a breaking up of the clouds. And 
 scarcely any other of Mr. Tennyson's poems is open 
 to the faintest suspicion of portraying emotion merely 
 for its dramatic interest. In Dora and Love and 
 Duty the suffering is felt through every nerve. The 
 simple unconscious pathos of the one, and the high- 
 wrought reflective passion of the other, meet in this 
 expression of a genuine grief. A three-volume novel 
 could not impress the essential characteristics of each 
 tale with more vividness than the brief poems, in 
 which the incidents are boldly sketched in outline, 
 and the crisis of the passion struck off with a rapid 
 and masterly force of hand. But in both poems, 
 when the battle has been fought, the sharp agony 
 passed, and all pretence of conventional consolation 
 abandoned, the peace that comes of victory over self 
 shines clearly down upon the hearts of the victims, 
 and the striking drama, the pathetic tale, points 
 forward to a life purified, strengthened, and even 
 softened by the conflict. As a mere tale, Dora 
 might have ended with the reconciliation; it is the 
 higher instinct of the moral teacher that leads Mr. 
 Tennyson to add 
 
 F2
 
 68 ESSAYS. 
 
 So those four abode 
 
 Within one house together; and as years 
 Went forward, Mary took another mate; 
 But Dora lived unmarried till her death. 
 
 And it is not the love that 
 
 Sits brooding on the ruins of a life, 
 Nightmare of youth, the spectre of himself, 
 
 that prompts the speaker in Love and Duty to close 
 his passionate recollections with a strain of exquisite 
 sensibility to external "beauty and softened visions 
 of the future of his lost mistress : 
 
 Live yet live, 
 
 Shall sharpest pathos blight us, knowing all 
 Life needs for life is possible to will 
 Live happy ! tend thy flowers : be tended by 
 My blessing! should my shadow cross thy thoughts 
 Too sadly for their peace, so put it back 
 For calmer hours in memory's darkest hold; 
 If unforgotten ! should it cross thy dreams, 
 So might it come like one that looks content, 
 With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth, 
 And point thee forward to a distant light, 
 Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart 
 And leave thee freer, till thou wake refresh' d, 
 Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown 
 Full quire, and morning driVn. her plow of pearl 
 Far furrowing into light the mounded rack, 
 Beyond the fair green fieldi and eastern sea. 
 
 In Locksley Hall we pass to a poem of a widely 
 different strain. It is against the fickleness of a 
 woman, not against circumstances which leave her
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 69 
 
 image pure and beautiful in the memory, that the 
 speaker in Locksley Hall has to find a resource. 
 And he finds it in the excitement of enterprise and 
 action, in glowing anticipations of progress for the 
 human race. He not merely recovers his sympathy 
 with his fellow men, and his interest in life, which 
 had been paralysed by the unworthiness of her who 
 represented for him all that was beautiful and good 
 in life, but he recovers it on higher and firmer 
 ground. What he lost was a world that reflected 
 his own unclouded enjoyment, his buoyant ardour 
 and high spirits ; a world appreciated mainly in its 
 capacity for affording variety to his perceptive activity 
 and scope for his unflagging energies; a world of 
 which he himself, with his pleasures and his am- 
 bitions, was the centre. What he gains is a world 
 that is fulfilling a divine purpose, beside which his 
 personal enjoyments are infinitely unimportant, but 
 in aiding and apprehending which his true blessed- 
 ness is purified and deepened ; a world in which he 
 is infinitely small and insignificant, but greater in 
 his brotherhood with the race which is evolving 
 ' the idea of humanity' than in any possible grandeur 
 of his own. The poem has been called 'morbid,' 
 a phrase that has acquired a perfectly new meaning 
 of late years, and is made to include all works of
 
 70 ESSAYS. 
 
 art, and all views of life that are coloured by other 
 than comfortable feelings. If Locksley Hall, as a 
 whole, is morbid, then it is morbid to represent 
 a young man rising above an early disappointment 
 in love, and coming out from it stronger, less sen- 
 sitive, more sinewed for action. 
 
 What has led certain critics to call the poem 
 morbid is, of course, that the speaker's judgment 
 of his age, in the earlier part, is coloured by his 
 private wrong and grief. But it is not morbid, 
 on the contrary, it is perfectly natural and right 
 that outrages on the affections should disturb the 
 calmness of the judgment, that acts of treacherous 
 weakness should excite indignation and scorn; and 
 the view of the world natural to this state of mind 
 is quite as true as that current upon the Stock 
 Exchange, and not at all more partial or prejudiced. 
 It is not, indeed, the highest, any more than it 
 is a complete view, but it is higher and truer than 
 the serene contemplation of a comfortable Epicu- 
 rean or passionless thinker. There is no cynicism 
 in the ' fine curses' of Locksley Hall ; they are not 
 the poisonous exhalations of a corrupted nature, but 
 the thunder and lightning that clear the air of what 
 is foul, the forces by which a loving and poetical 
 mind, not yet calmed and strengthened by experience
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 71 
 
 and general principles, repels unaccustomed outrage 
 and wrong. With what a rich emotion he recals 
 his early recollections! Sea, sandy shore and sky 
 have been for him a perpetual fountain of beauty 
 and of joy, his youth a perpetual feast of imaginative 
 knowledge and pictorial glory. 
 
 Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, 
 Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the west. 
 
 Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, 
 Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. 
 
 Here about the beach I wander' d, nourishing a youth sublime 
 With the fairy tales of Science, and the long result of Time. 
 
 With what a touching air of tenderness and pro- 
 tection he watches the young girl whom he loves 
 in secret, and whose paleness and thinness excite 
 his pity as well as his hope. How rapturously, 
 when she avows her love, he soars up in his joy 
 with a flight that would be tumultuous but for the 
 swiftness of the motion, unsteady but for the sub- 
 stantial massiveness of thought, and the grand poising 
 sweep of the lyric power that sustains it : 
 
 Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing 
 
 hands ; 
 Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. 
 
 Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with 
 
 might ; 
 Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of 
 
 sight.
 
 72 ESSAYS. 
 
 Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring, 
 And her whisper throng* d my pulses with the fulness of the 
 Spring. 
 
 Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, 
 And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips. 
 
 Then how pathetic the sudden fall, the modulation 
 by which he passes from the key of rapture to that 
 of despair: 
 
 my cousin, shallow-hearted ! my Amy, mine no more ! 
 the dreary, dreary moorland! the barren, barren shore! 
 
 And here and there, through all that storm of anger, 
 sarcasm, contempt, denunciation that follows, there 
 sounds a note of unutterable tenderness which gives 
 to the whole movement a prevailing character of pain 
 and anguish, of moral desolation, rather than of 
 wrath and vengeance. Not till this mood exhausts 
 itself, and the mind of the speaker turns to action 
 as a resource against despair, does he realise all 
 that he has lost. Not only is his love uprooted, 
 his hope, his faith in the world have perished in 
 that lightning flash; and he turns again to his 
 glorious youth, but now only to sound the gulf 
 that separates him from it. The noble aspirations, 
 the ardent hopes, the sanguine prophecies of earlier 
 years roll in rich pomp of music and of picture before 
 us ; but it is the cloud-pageantry of the boy's day- 
 dream which breaks up to reveal the world as it
 
 TUNNYSON'S POEMS. 73 
 
 appears now to the 'palsied heart' and 'jaundiced 
 eye' of the man. Yet, in the midst of this dis- 
 tempered vision are seen glimpses of a deeper truth, 
 The eternal law of progress is not "broken "because 
 the individual man is shipwrecked. It is but a 
 momentary glimpse, and offers no firm footing. His 
 personal happiness, after all, is what concerns each 
 person. Here, at least, in this convention-ridden, 
 Mammon-worshipping Europe, where the passions 
 are cramped, and action that would give scope to 
 passionate energy impossible, the individual has no 
 chance. But in some less advanced civilization, 
 where the individual is freer if the race be less 
 forward, there may be hope. And a picture of the 
 tropics rises before the imagination, dashed off in 
 a few strokes of marvellous breadth and richness of 
 colour : 
 
 There to -wander far away, 
 On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. 
 
 Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, 
 Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise. 
 
 Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, 
 Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the 
 crag; 
 
 Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree 
 Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. 
 
 But the deeper nature of the man controls the de- 
 lusion of the fancy ; his heart, reason, and conscience
 
 74 ESSAYS. 
 
 revolt against the escape into a mere savage freedom ; 
 they will not allow him to drop out of the van of 
 the advancing host; and manly courage comes with 
 the great thought of a society that is rapidly fulfilling 
 the idea of humanity ; the personal unhappiness, the 
 private wrong, the bitterness of outraged affection, 
 give way before the upswelling sympathy with the 
 triumph of the race to which he belongs. The 
 passion has passed in the rush of words that gave 
 it expression, and life shines clear again, no longer 
 on the tender-hearted, imaginative boy, but on the 
 man 
 
 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 
 
 There is no poem of Tennyson's more strikingly 
 dramatic throughout than this, and none in which 
 an age weakened by sentimental indulgence may find 
 thoughts more suggestive of its recovery to manly 
 vigour and endurance. And if, in works of art, 
 artistic beauty alone be looked for, no poem can be 
 more rich in colour, more rapid in movement, more 
 abundant in exquisite beauties of detail. The verse 
 is a marvel of force and grace, full, majestic, im- 
 petuous, thundering on like the downrash of a 
 mighty cataract, with its infinite pulsations of light, 
 its dazzling interradiation of changing forms and
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 75 
 
 colours the avr)pi6/j,ov yeX,aa-/4a translated into sound. 
 Its grand music, poured, full of grief and indigna- 
 tion, to the long swell of the waves upon the flat 
 sandy shore, recals the Homeric 
 
 BT; 8' a.Kav irapa Otva iro\v<$>\oi(T$oio 6a\affffris' 
 noAAa 8" firetr' airavfvOe K.KHV Tjpaff 6 yepatos 
 
 no less by its majesty of rhythm than by the likeness 
 of the locality. 
 
 The four principal poems in the third series of 
 Mr. Tennyson's works which depict love in its 
 various influences upon different characters and under 
 differing circumstances have been now more or less 
 fully touched on ; and their general characteristic is, 
 that the passion there shown in operation is a purify- 
 ing, strengthening, sustaining power; that it allies 
 itself with conscience and reason, and braces instead 
 of debilitating the will. The small poem called 
 Fatima is the only instance in which Mr. Tennyson 
 has expended his powers in portraying any love that 
 incapacitates for the common duties of life, unless 
 the two Marianas be regarded in this light, which 
 would be a perverse misconception of their main 
 purpose. In Locksley Hall the ghost of a murdered 
 love is fairly laid, and the man comes out of his 
 conflict the stronger and the clearer for his experience. 
 Nothing that can with any propriety be called morbid
 
 76 EBSJLY8. 
 
 or unhealthy belongs to any of the great love poems 
 in the collection ; and surely the view of the relation 
 of the sexes in the Princess is as sound a basis for 
 a noble life as was ever propounded. It would be 
 singular if, with such antecedents, Mr. Tennyson 
 should, in the maturity of his intellect and expe- 
 rience, have descended to exhibit the influence of 
 love upon a weak and worthless character, and have 
 chosen for that purpose a melodramatic story of 
 suicide, murder, and madness, dished up for popular 
 applause with vehement invective on the vices of 
 the English nation, and claptrap appeals to the war- 
 feeling of the day. This, however, is what we 
 are asked to believe of Mr. Tennyson's latest pro- 
 duction, Maud, by the loudest professional critics of 
 the journals and magazines. The critics give' us 
 some gauge of their opinion by tracing Mr. Tenny- 
 son's gradual degradation through the Princess, lower 
 still in In Memoriam, to its climax of weakness 
 and absurdity in Maud; and it is but justice to 
 say that these opinions are not now for the first 
 time put forth on the provocation of the last-named 
 poem, but appear to be the deliberate convictions 
 of the writers. We believe that both the Princess 
 and In Memoriam are in their sixth edition, which, 
 apart from private experience, necessarily limited,
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 77 
 
 of the impression the works have produced, leads 
 to the conclusion that these writers do not in this 
 case fairly represent the opinion of the English public. 
 Whether they represent it any better in respect to 
 Maud remains to be seen. Meanwhile it is well 
 not to be frightened out of the enjoyment of fine 
 poetry, and out of the instruction to be gained 
 from a great poet's views of life, as exhibited dra- 
 matically in the destiny of a particular sort of cha- 
 racter subjected to a particular set of influences, by 
 such epithets as l morbid,' l hysterical,' l spasmodic,' 
 which may mean one thing or another, according 
 to the sense, discrimination and sympathy of the 
 man who applies them. 
 
 There is little question as to the artistic merits 
 of Maud. It is only the aim of the poet that has 
 been assailed ; his execution is generally admitted 
 to be successful. It may be at once conceded that 
 the writer of the fragments of a life which tell the 
 story of Maud, is not in a comfortable state of mind 
 when he begins his record ; and that if a gentleman 
 were to utter such sentiments at a board of railway 
 directors, or at a marriage breakfast, he might not 
 improperly be called hysterical. Like the hero of 
 Locksley Hall, his view of the life around him, of 
 the world in which his lot is cast, has been coloured
 
 78 USSAYS. 
 
 by a grievous personal calamity; and the character 
 of the man is originally one in which the sensi- 
 bilities are keen and delicate, the speculative element 
 strong, the practical judgment unsteady, the will 
 and active energies comparatively feeble. A Shelley 
 or a Keats may stand for example of his type ; not 
 perfect men, certainly, but scarcely so contemptible 
 as not to possess both dramatic interest and some claim 
 to human sympathy. Chatterton, a much lower type 
 than either, has been thought a subject of psycho- 
 logical and moral interest, in spite or in consequence 
 of the vulgar, petulant, weak melodrama of his life 
 and death. You see, God makes these morbid, 
 hysterical, spasmodic individuals occasionally, and 
 they have various fates; some die without a sign; 
 others try the world, and dash themselves dead 
 against its bars; some few utter their passionate 
 desires, their weak complaints, their ecstatic raptures 
 in snatches of song that make the world delirious 
 with delight, and somehow, for their sake the class 
 becomes interesting, and we are at times inclined 
 to measure the spiritual capacity of an age by its 
 treatment of these weak souls, by the fact, whether 
 the general constitution of society cherishes such 
 souls into divine lovers and singers of the beautiful, 
 or lashes and starves and chains them into moping
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 79 
 
 idiots and howling madmen. The autobiographer 
 of Maud belongs to this class by temperament, as 
 anyone may understand from the turn of his angry 
 thoughts to those social evils which must and ought 
 to excite indignation and scorn in gentle and loving 
 natures that are at the same time inspired with 
 generous and lofty ideas; from the speculative enig- 
 mas he torments himself with at the prevalence 
 of rapine and pain in creation, at the insignificance 
 of man in a boundless universe, subject to iron laws ; 
 from the penetrating tenderness, the rich fancy, the 
 childlike naivete of his love for the young girl who 
 saves him from himself and his dark dreams. There 
 lies in such a character, from the beginning, the 
 capacity for weakness and misery, for crime and 
 madness. That capacity is inseparable from keen 
 sensibility, powerful emotions, and active imagination ; 
 and if events happen which paralyze the will already 
 feeble, turn the flow of feeling into a stream of 
 bitterness, and present to the imagination a world 
 of wrong and suffering, the capacity fulfils itself 
 according to the force and direction of the events. 
 In Maud the tendency meets with events that 
 carry it on through these stages; and the question 
 is whether any one of these events is impossible 
 or improbable, whether English society is misrepre-
 
 80 ESSAYS. 
 
 sented when it is made capable of furnishing the 
 unwholesome nutriment for such a character. It 
 would rather seem as if the only improbable incident 
 in the whole story were that which redeems society 
 from a wholesale charge; as if the daughter of 
 the millionaire, the sister of 'the dandy-despot, the 
 oiled and curled Assyrian bull,' were the least likely 
 character of the whole group. God be thanked, 
 however, there are such girls ; and many a noble 
 woman like the Princess Ida has given her heart 
 out of pity to a man whose energy and hope she 
 saw crushed for want of sympathy, and would en- 
 dorse these lines: 
 
 Perhaps the smile and tender tone 
 Came out of her pitying womanhood, 
 
 For am I not, am I not, here alone 
 So many a summer since she died, 
 
 My mother, who was so gentle and good? 
 
 And many a man who seems to himself to be living 
 on without motive, l a death in life, ' could say, 
 
 Ah ! what shall I he at fifty, 
 
 Should Nature keep me alive, 
 
 If I find the world so hitter 
 
 When I am hut twenty-five? 
 
 Yet, if she were not a cheat, 
 
 If Maud were all that she seem'd, 
 
 And her smile were all that I dream' d, 
 
 Then the world were not so bitter 
 
 But a smile could make it sweet.
 
 TUNNYSOWS POEMS. 81 
 
 No doubt it is only weak characters who are 
 affected in this way. To strong men the world is 
 not made bitter by a father's ruin and suicide, by 
 the prevalence of meanness and cruelty, by con- 
 temptuous neglect, and general absence of sympathy. 
 Nor would a girl's smile atone to them for such 
 calamities as do affect them. So weakness has its 
 compensation. 
 
 But then, some one will say, if the poet's in- 
 tention were to exhibit the restorative power of love 
 over a delicate and beautiful mind overthrown by 
 circumstances, 
 
 Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh, 
 
 and if, in respect to this intention, we allow the 
 exhibition of the disease in order to feel the full 
 force of the restoring influence, and of course are 
 prepared that the love should be of a kind correspond- 
 ing to the character, rapturous, fanciful, childish, 
 fitted more for a Southern woman like Juliet, as 
 one of the best critics of Maud has remarked, than 
 for an Englishman, why does not the poet carry 
 out his intention, and conduct his story to a happy 
 close? Why, good sir or madam, does not Shak- 
 speare let Juliet and her Romeo adorn Verona with 
 troops of little Juliets and Romeos, to do as their 
 papa and mamma did before them ? Why does not 
 
 G
 
 82 
 
 Cordelia live to comfort Lear in his old age, re- 
 stored to true appreciation of his daughters? Why 
 does Ophelia drown in a ditch; and Hamlet, after 
 murdering Polonius, die by chance medley? Why 
 are not Othello's eyes opened before, instead of after 
 his fatal deed, and he and Desdemona allowed to 
 spend the rest of their days in peace and mutual 
 trust ? Is it, think you, because Shakspeare belongs 
 to the hysterical, morbid, spasmodic school, and 
 likes the violent excitement of melodramatic in- 
 cident? We should be sorry to stake much upon 
 the reception any of these poetic issues would meet 
 with from certain critics, if they now for the first 
 time came Tip for judgment. Perhaps in all these 
 cases he had some vague design of moving certain 
 passions which the older critics knew by the name of 
 pity and terror, and to which one who was himself 
 something of a poet the author of Samson Agonistes 
 refers approvingly, on the authority of Aristotle, as 
 the justifying motive of tragedy. Perhaps, too, he 
 might think it his business, in delineating particular 
 characters, to express in their destiny his view of 
 the general condition of society, as tested by the 
 fate and fortunes of such characters. And possibly 
 Mr. Tennyson may think himself justified in pre- 
 senting a story that does not end happily, for both
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 83 
 
 these reasons. It may appear to him that 'the 
 course of true love' would be unlikely to 'run 
 smooth' under the circumstances of Maud and her 
 lover, combined with the conditions of English 
 modern life; that the man had not the coolness and 
 self-control to master the circumstances; and that 
 there was not in society the generosity and disregard 
 of rank and money necessary to allow the restorative 
 influence of Maud's affection to work out its cure. 
 Divest the story for a moment of its lyric elevation, 
 and compare it with our greatest novelist's treatment 
 of a somewhat kindred case. Suppose Mr. Barnes 
 Newcome had not been a coward as well as a brute, 
 and had found his sister Ethel holding a tete-a-tete 
 in the garden with her cousin Clive, after an evening 
 party to which the Most Noble the Marquis of 
 Farintosh had been invited expressly to conclude his 
 courtship, is it not possible that Mr. Barnes and 
 his cousin might have enacted the scene between 
 the 'Assyrian bull' and Maud's lover? The phy- 
 sical courage of the Assyrian bull is quite as true, 
 to say the least, to the real types of his class as 
 the physical cowardice of Barnes Newcome. But 
 the object of the novelist not being to excite pity 
 and terror, he developes the selfishness and Mammon- 
 worship of English rich people to other consequences 
 G2
 
 84 ESSAYS. 
 
 and in another direction. The poet takes his course, 
 too, with equal effect towards carrying out his design, 
 and without violating, so far as we see, the essential 
 contemporary truth of his story; while he is thus 
 enabled to exhibit some of the eternal elements of 
 tragedy still in operation among us. 
 
 We need say nothing of the skill and beauty 
 with which the remorse of the murderer is painted. 
 The wonderful power of the strains in which the 
 successive stages of this feeling are represented, is 
 admitted on all hands. English literature has 
 nothing more dramatically expressive of a mind 
 on the verge of overthrow, than the verses in which 
 the shell on the Brittany coast serves as text; 
 nothing that presents the incipient stage of madness, 
 springing from the wrecked affections, with more of 
 reality and pathos than the poem, ' Oh ! that 'twere 
 possible,' now recovered from the pages of a long- 
 forgotten miscellany, and set as a jewel amid jewels ; 
 nothing that surpasses in truth and terrible force 
 the madhouse soliloquy, ' Dead, long dead !' If the 
 poem had ended there, 'the strangest anti-climax 
 that we ever remember to have read' would not 
 have offended a recent critic. We fear that in 
 that case, true enough to nature as it might have 
 been, the climax would have come in for blame
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 85 
 
 of the opposite character, and the poet have been 
 found fault with for leaving his readers to dwell 
 upon horrible impressions without relief. We are 
 sure that no poet deserving the name would choose 
 such an ending where any other was possible. But 
 men do recover from madness, and can though 
 with an awe-struck sense of their own unfitness for 
 life, a nervous apprehension that paralyzes energy 
 and action, be raised to interest themselves in some- 
 thing out of themselves and their miseries. And 
 Mr. Tennyson, who introduces his hero breathing 
 scorn and indignation on the meanness and little- 
 ness of a society, where the vices of individuals 
 are not obscured and compensated by any conscious 
 noble aim of the commonwealth, dismisses him, 
 cheered and strengthened by knowing that the 
 British nation has risen for a time to a conscious- 
 ness of a great purpose, has awaked out of its 
 commercial epicureanism, and roused itself to fight 
 a battle for the right and the good. In sympathy 
 with a grand purpose and a high resolve animating his 
 countrymen, the dreary phantom that had haunted 
 him departs ; he knows that his love has forgiven 
 him the injury that his passionate heart caused her; 
 and he can wait, calm and hopeful, till death re- 
 unites them.
 
 86 ESSAYS. 
 
 The fact is, that Mr. Tennyson, without aban- 
 doning his lyric forms, has in Maud written a 
 tragedy a work, that is, which demands to be 
 judged, not by the intrinsic goodness and beauty 
 of the actions and emotions depicted, but by their 
 relation to character ; that character, again, being not 
 only an interesting study in itself and moving our 
 sympathy, but being related dynamically to the 
 society of the time which serves as the background 
 of the picture, and thus displaying the characteristics 
 of the society by showing its influence, under par- 
 ticular circumstances, upon the character selected. 
 Mr. Tennyson's critics have for the most part read 
 the poem as if its purpose were to hold up an ex- 
 ample for our imitation, and have condemned it 
 because, viewed in this light, it offers nothing but 
 a nature of over-excitable sensibilities, first rendered 
 moody by misfortune, then driven mad by its own 
 crime, and finally recovered to a weak exultation in 
 a noble enterprise it has not the manliness to share. 
 But no one feels that Shakspeare is immoral in 
 making Othello kill himself; no one attributes the 
 cynicism of Mephistopheles to Goethe. 
 
 Why then should the author of The Gardener's 
 Daughter be set down as morbid? the author of 
 Locksley Hall as one who sees no worth in action?
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 87 
 
 the author of Dora as a selfish dreamer, who knows 
 nothing of duty? Let us try and be as just to the 
 great men that live amongst us, as to those who are 
 beyond our praise or blame. Let us not stone 
 our own prophets, while we build the tombs of the 
 men who prophesied to our forefathers. 
 
 It is a step back in respect of date to speak of 
 The Princess after Maud ; but while the latter is 
 the deepest and most tragical exhibition of the action 
 of love upon the character and destiny of an indi- 
 vidual that Mr. Tennyson has given to the world, 
 the former treats the sexual relations in their most 
 comprehensive form, and may so be considered as 
 containing implicitly all individual love-poems, as 
 the poetical statement of the law which they all 
 exhibit in particular instances. In its philosophical 
 aim, therefore, The Princess belongs to the same 
 class of poems as The Palace of Art and The Vision 
 of Sin, in both of which a law of life is presented, 
 not as modified by the peculiar nature and circum- 
 stances of an individual, but in its absolute univer- 
 sality as a law for the human race. It is natural 
 enough that in an age when absolute and universal 
 solutions are sought not only for physical phenomena, 
 but also for mental and social, when not only the 
 movements of the heavenly bodies and the complex
 
 88 ESSAYS. 
 
 relations of the constituent elements of organic 
 matter, but the course of thought the growth, decay, 
 and character of states, in a word, the whole life 
 of the individual, and the collective life of humanity, 
 are supposed to be traceable to the orderly operation 
 of fixed principles, it is natural that, fascinated by 
 the grandeur of speculations of this immensity, the 
 poet, too, should attempt to rise above the portraiture 
 of individual life to the exhibition, in an absolute 
 form, of the principles that determine individual life. 
 Always, indeed, it has been held that the highest 
 poetry gave the law as well as the special instance ; 
 interpreted humanity as well as some individual life ; 
 and became highest by blending, as they say, the 
 universal with the particular. This, however, simply 
 means that true portraiture of individual life neces- 
 sarily involves generic and specific, as well as in- 
 dividual truth; that John or Mary must be man 
 and woman English man and English woman to 
 be a pair of real human beings, under the influence 
 of any particular feelings. Such poems as those 
 mentioned above drop the individual and the special 
 altogether, and attempt to present a law of human 
 nature in operation upon beings who are human 
 without being particular men or women. Now, it 
 is the very essence of poetry to present, not abstract
 
 TUNNTSON'S POEMS. 89 
 
 propositions to the intellect, but concrete real truth 
 to the senses, the affections, to the whole man, 
 in short; and this can be done only by presenting 
 objects as they exist and act upon one another, 
 and upon our minds, in the real world, not logical 
 objects formed by the action of our analytic faculty, 
 and abstracted from reality. Such universality as 
 poetry has is derived from the fact, that the indi- 
 vidual contains the genus and the species, and that 
 the pure universal of the intellect has no counter- 
 part in nature, and is therefore not a truth in the 
 sense in which poetry concerns itself with truth. 
 And poets who attempt to get beyond individual 
 truth, implicitly containing generic and specific truth, 
 fall into one of two mistakes : they either present 
 the truth as abstract statement, dressed up in rhe- 
 torical ornament, and so fail to fulfil the true function 
 of their genius, or, feeling the necessity of avoid- 
 ing this, they invent a fictitious allegorical machinery, 
 with which they obscure the statement, and are, 
 in fact, treating a special instance, with this differ- 
 ence, that the individual traits are fanciful and 
 arbitrary, instead of being those of actual experience. 
 The result, in the latter case, is that the reader 
 makes the universality by his abstraction of details, 
 getting, at last, back to a mere abstract state-
 
 90 ESSAYS. 
 
 ment, and so loses all the force of true poetic 
 teaching; while, as the only compensation, his ima- 
 gination is amused by the ingenuity and beauty 
 of the machinery. And, in both cases, by aiming 
 at an universality which belongs to science, poetry 
 loses her true prerogative; and no longer command- 
 ing the sympathies, fails to teach, becoming at 
 once less useful and less delightful. The Palace 
 of Art and The Vision of Sin are instances of 
 the one mode of treatment ; The Two Voices may 
 partly serve to illustrate the other. All three 
 contain exquisite detail, but the whole fails of its 
 effect. And were we compelled to regard The 
 Princess solely as an attempt to exhibit the action 
 and justification of sexual love as an universal law 
 of human life, as an allegory, aiming at scientific 
 generality, a similar failure would certainly have 
 to be recorded. The machinery would, in that case, 
 be overdone would attract the attention to detail 
 quite as much as if a merely common love-story 
 were being told, without giving the force of reality, 
 and would, by the preponderance of detail and 
 traits of individuality and special circumstance, de- 
 rogate from the pure universality of the problem. 
 But, in fact, The. Princess is l earnest wed with 
 sport,' the attempt of a mind, whose feeling for
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 91 
 
 the beautiful and the true is stronger than its humour 
 and fun, to treat certain modern mistakes about the 
 true relation of man and woman with good-humoured 
 satire, and in spite of this intention impelled to 
 a strain of serious thought and impassioned feeling. 
 It is a laugh subsiding into a loving smile, playful 
 irony surprised into tenderness and tears. But 
 because the commencement is mock-heroic, and the 
 machinery highly fanciful though not so removed 
 from possibility as to baffle belief and distress the 
 judgment, the earnest close seems rather the poet's 
 own utterance of his views of the relations of the 
 sexes, than the inherent moral of the story. And 
 admiring, as all must, the sweet tenderness and 
 noble thought of the dialogue that ends the poem, 
 the magnificence, at once so rich and tasteful, of 
 the description of the woman's college, and of the 
 scenery about it, the exquisite sentiment and finish 
 of the interspersed songs and idylls, the movement 
 and dramatic life of the whole poem, one cannot 
 help regretting that the longest, and in some respects 
 the finest, of Mr. Tennyson's productions should 
 have been fairly characterized by him as ' A Medley,' 
 and that he should have been obliged at last to 
 say, 
 
 Then rose a little feud betwixt the two 
 Betwixt the mockers and the realists :
 
 92 ESSAYS. 
 
 And I, betwixt them both, to please them both, 
 
 And yet to give the story as it rose, 
 
 I moved as in a strange diagonal, 
 
 And maybe neither pleased myself nor them. 
 
 However, the incongruity is there, and we must 
 make the test of it. It interferes, somewhat, with 
 our interest in the loves of the Prince and Princess 
 as actual human beings, and deprives the grand 
 philosophic sentiment at the close of the impressive- 
 ness that belongs to the moral of an actual human 
 story. On the other hand, the impulse towards an 
 earnest treatment of the subject, struggling through 
 and finally overcoming the mock-heroic, gives the 
 advantage of a contrast, and we pass from the one 
 to the other with a heightened zest and relish. 
 Altogether, if we give ourselves up to the poet 
 not setting rules for him, but letting him take us 
 along as he will, and accepting his account of the 
 origin and motives of his poem, we shall find nothing 
 wanting to a complete work of art, which may not 
 be the most profound or affecting treatment of a 
 great truth, but which, flowering thick with beauties 
 of detail, is graceful and noble throughout, and 
 rises to a close in which lofty thought and passion- 
 ate feeling blend, typifying the union of man and 
 woman, in one full, rich stream of poetry, 
 
 The two-celled heart beating with one full stroke 
 Life.
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 93 
 
 We have not spoken of Mr. Tennyson as a song 
 writer ; yet, had he written nothing but half-a-dozen 
 of his best songs, his place among English poets 
 would have been incontestably high. Flow down 
 cold Rivulet to the Sea Break, break The Bugle 
 Song Tears , idle Tears Come down, Maid, from 
 yonder Mountain Height, and the lyric that sparkles 
 through The Brook, would by themselves found a 
 reputation as lasting as the English language. One 
 might almost as well attempt to define the simple 
 sensations or to explain why a melody in music 
 charms the ear, as to convey in words the impres- 
 sion any of these songs makes upon the reader. 
 One may analyse them, and put down the separate 
 feelings and images of which they consist; but the 
 effort to reflect upon them substitutes thoughts for 
 sentiments, as some of the most delicate perfumes 
 of flowers refuse to yield themselves to an effort, 
 and only affect us as we catch their evanescent 
 fragrance in fitful wafts. Take, for instance, Tears, 
 idle Tears, to which the title of Regret might be 
 affixed. No doubt its charm partly depends on the 
 pathetic character of the separate images collected 
 from human life by the dominant feeling, and on 
 the skill with which these rise gradually to a climax. 
 The sad pleasure excited by the waning fields in
 
 94 ESSAYS. 
 
 autumn one of the lightest and most evanescent 
 of regrets, deepens into the feelings with which 
 the return and the departure of friends whose dwell- 
 ing is beyond the ocean is regarded. It passes, by 
 a most natural and touching gradation, to that last 
 parting from all that is dear upon earth, when the 
 sweetness of the least objects that have blended 
 with happy lives is solemnized and saddened by 
 the thought that it is felt for the last time by the 
 departing spirit; and that solemn sweetness passes 
 again to a climax in the passion of tenderness and 
 regret which makes the memory of the dead dearer 
 than the presence of the living, the passion of 
 tenderness and despair which gives an agonizing 
 rapture to the dreams of hopeless love. 
 
 But the power of the song over our feelings is 
 far greater than can be attributed to any succession 
 of pathetic recollections of human life presented 
 distinctly as objects of thought. It awakes all the 
 fountains of bitter-sweet memory, sets us dreaming 
 like a half audible strain of music in the distance, 
 without fixing the mind to definite objects, suspends 
 reflection and will, and brings up all the delicious 
 sweetness of the past with the sadness that it is past, 
 all the brightness of our brightest moments witli 
 the cloud that so soon passes over them, the
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 95 
 
 meetings and the partings, the eternal change and 
 flow, that make up human life. It is in its infi- 
 nite suggestiveness that its charm lies ; in its power, 
 not to bring this or that pathetic remembrance 
 before the mind, but to set the mind at the tone 
 of delicious day-dreaming, and to give a half-blissful, 
 half-regretful key-note to the day-dreams. And this 
 subtle power of suggestiveness belongs more or less 
 to all Mr. Tennyson's songs ; they all seem to touch 
 chords that lie deeper down than the region of clear 
 intellectual consciousness ; they present definite ideas, 
 but they present them with such delicacy of touch 
 as to leave the mind only half conscious of their 
 presence, just sufficiently conscious to be set off 
 dreaming about them, to feel their influence without 
 being drawn out of itself to them, while the melody 
 of the strain keeps up the creative power of dream- 
 ing at its highest activity. 
 
 Scarcely one of the more elaborate poems of which 
 we have spoken, though its main object is to present 
 the passion of love in its influence upon various 
 characters under various circumstances, fails to supply 
 abundant evidence of Mr. Tennyson's interest in 
 other phases of life than those coloured by high 
 emotion, and of his power to present them with new 
 force and meaning. A fine sense of natural beauty
 
 96 ESSAYS. 
 
 and a marvellous faculty of word-painting adorn his 
 love-poems with landscape pictures which need fear 
 comparison with those of no English poet. Locksley 
 Hall is a grand hymn of human progress, in which 
 the discoveries of science, the inventions of art, the 
 order and movement of society, the sublime hopes 
 and beliefs of religion, blend in a magnificent vision 
 of the age, and are sung with the rapture of a 
 prophet to the noblest music. In Maud the com- 
 monest newspaper details of the meanness,, the cheat- 
 ing, the cruelty, the crime and misery, so rife among 
 us, supply food to the sceva indignatio of the man 
 whose temperament and circumstances make him 
 look on the darker aspects of the time ; and the same 
 man finds in the latest topic of the day which is 
 also one of the grandest spectacles of our age the 
 comfort and the hope that restore him to sanity and 
 peace with himself and the world. In The Princess, 
 history, science, and metaphysics are touched with 
 a light of penetrating intellect as well as a grace of 
 poetry; the amusements of a Mechanics' Institute 
 and the genial pleasantry of a gay picnic party 
 contrast with the profoundest reflections on the 
 Continental Revolutions of ' 48 and the most hopeful 
 interpretations of the last new socialist theories. It 
 is this wide range of thought, ever active in every
 
 POEMS. 97 
 
 direction to supply material for the imaginative 
 faculty of the artist, this catholic sympathy with 
 modern life in all its characteristic phases, that is 
 Mr. Tennyson's distinguishing quality, and that, in 
 combination with his formal poetic skill, renders him 
 the favourite poet of the cultivated classes. And 
 it is in the development of this wide range of 
 thought and sympathy in his poems published since 
 1833 that the growth and maturity of his genius 
 mainly manifests itself. It is because he has grown 
 and ripened as a man that his art has seemed to 
 become more perfect with every production. 
 
 Although, however, these qualities are abundantly 
 evidenced by the poems hitherto treated, it would 
 leave this survey incomplete were we not to allude 
 to the poems which are devoted expressly to the 
 delineation of other phases of modern life than those 
 mainly dependent on the passion of sexual love. If 
 there were no other motive, the necessity of indi- 
 cating Mr. Tennyson's power of writing in a homelier, 
 a less ornate and elaborate style than he generally 
 adopts as the proper dramatic expression of the 
 characters and moods of passion he is presenting, 
 would be motive enough. But in fact The Brook, 
 Edwin Morris, and The Golden Year, are among his 
 most pleasing productions. The Day Dream, really 
 
 H
 
 98 USSAYS. 
 
 a love-poem within a love-poem, exquisitely blends 
 sport with earnest, and might be taken in its growth 
 from The Sleeping Beauty to its present elaborate 
 form as a type of the development of Mr. Tennyson's 
 genius from sensuous beauty and rhythmical music 
 to the deep heart and wise intellect of his later 
 poems. Audley Court contains a charming song and 
 a delicious moonlight landscape, besides a trans- 
 cendant description of a game-pie. Walking to the 
 Mail is a shrewd conversation on the causes that 
 develope character and determine political opinion ; 
 not in our opinion particularly worthy of blank verse 
 or its place in the collection. Then there are the 
 expressly political lyrics, one of which, at least, Love 
 thou thy Land, is only to be compared with an essay 
 of Lord Bacon's for its compressed energy and 
 imaginative reality of phrase, for its fulness and 
 wisdom of sentiment; and far above any essay of 
 Lord Bacon's for its ardent patriotism, its noble sense 
 of right and truth, its grand faith in human destiny, 
 its prudence, and its courage. An obscure stanza 
 or two scarcely make themselves felt in the re- 
 collection of its general effect. 
 
 But we must speak briefly of In Memoriam. 
 What survey of Mr. Tennyson's poetry could be 
 satisfactory without it? Certainly not ours, who do
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 99 
 
 not believe all feelings to be morbid and unhealthy 
 which are not joyous or comfortable, and who do 
 believe that sorrow, and doubt, and meditation have 
 their appointed beneficent influence upon human 
 character, and are no less part of human training for 
 a nobler and more blessed existence than mirth, and 
 demonstrative certainty, and vigorous action. We 
 should be guilty of treason against our deepest 
 convictions were we to pass without a protest the 
 notion that In Memoriam is a morbid mistake, the 
 unhealthy product of a man of genius in an un- 
 healthy mood, degrading his genius by employing it 
 in the delineation of a sorrow that is unmanly and 
 exaggerated, a spasmodic utterance of a weak mind, 
 that can only affect other weak minds with hysterical 
 emotion, and incapacitate all who subject themselves 
 to its influence for their duties to their fellow men 
 and their reliance upon the goodness of God. Even 
 if we regarded In Memoriam as simply the record 
 of a personal sorrow, a poetical monument to a 
 personal friend, we should be cautious of calling it 
 exaggerated, till we were quite certain that there was 
 anything unworthy and unmanly in binding up our 
 hearts with the life of another, and in feeling them 
 quiver with agony when that other life was torn from 
 us. It is easy to understand, when social intercourse 
 H2
 
 100 ESSAYS. 
 
 goes no deeper than liking and disliking, being 
 amused and bored; when personal relations have 
 dwindled down to club intimacies, and a friend is 
 the man with whom we dine and play whist; that 
 such a tender and rooted affection as is recorded 
 through In Memoriam should appear exaggerated. 
 The question is whether the Pall-Mali standard of 
 human nature be the highest, whether a profound 
 personal affection be really a weakness, or whether 
 on the Pali-Mall theory the world would not rapidly 
 become a pigstye or a slaughterhouse. Compare 
 the tone in which Shakspeare addresses the male 
 friend to whom the greater number of the sonnets 
 apply, with Tennyson's tone in speaking of Arthur 
 Hallam. If the one is supposed to do no discredit 
 to the soundest-hearted as well as the largest-minded 
 man of modern Europe, why is the other to be called 
 morbid and exaggerated? The critics need not take 
 so much trouble to let the world know that they are 
 not Shakspeares and Tennysons in heart any more 
 than in intellect. No one who knows the class 
 would be in danger of so erroneous a supposition. 
 But there are thousands of men and women whose 
 affections are akin to those of these great poets, and 
 who are grateful for the power of reading in beautiful 
 poetry an adequate expression of their own deepest
 
 TZNNYSOJTS POEMS. 101 
 
 feelings. We know that such persons find in In 
 Memoriam the sort of consolation and strength they 
 find in the Psalms of David. The suspiria de 
 profundis of great minds give articulate expression 
 to, and interpret the sorrows of lesser minds, which 
 else would darken life with 'clouds of nameless 
 trouble,' and perhaps never find a peaceful solution. 
 
 But the personal motive of In Memoriam is quite 
 inadequate as the standing point for criticism of the 
 poem. 
 
 The imaginative woe 
 That loves to handle spiritual strife 
 
 is operative throughout; and, as Coleridge says of 
 love, 
 
 All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 
 Are all but ministers of love, 
 And feed his sacred flame 
 
 so, In Memoriam traverses the widest circuit of 
 thought and feeling in search of nutriment to its 
 mood, and represents the night-side of the soul as 
 rich in objects and as various in hues, as the side 
 illuminated by love and joy, but all in sad greys 
 and browns, or shining with the tender grace of the 
 moonlight or starlight which the brilliance of the 
 full day conceals. There is as much variety and
 
 102 ESSAYS. 
 
 beauty in this aspect of life, as in the other ; and as 
 God has created us with large capacities for sorrow, 
 and has placed us in circumstances which give those 
 capacities ample employment, it is, perhaps, quite 
 as sensible to enquire what possible meaning lies in 
 this arrangement, as to ignore the fact altogether; 
 and quite as religious to presume that it has some 
 beneficent meaning, and is not without a gracious 
 design in training men to virtue and blessedness, as 
 to attempt to baffle the arrangement by drowning the 
 voice of nature in pleasure or in action. If all life 
 but enjoyment and action is morbid and unhealthy, 
 the world has been strangely misconstructed. The 
 mere comfort and serenity of the human race seem 
 not to have been leading objects in its design. Had 
 the Epicureans been consulted at the creation, they 
 could, no doubt, have suggested several improve- 
 ments. As a late eminent judge remarked, they 
 would have had it rain only during the night; and, 
 with Person, when Parr, 'the schoolmaster run to 
 seed, ' pompously asked him, l Mr. Professor, what 
 do you think of the existence of physical and moral 
 evil?' they would reply, 'Why, Doctor, I think .we 
 could have done very well without either. ' Un- 
 fortunately, neither Epicurean, nor stoic, nor egotist 
 of any school or sect, was taken into counsel when
 
 TENNYSON'S POEMS. 103 
 
 the foundations of the universe were laid. And 
 Mr. Tennyson, finding himself in a world where 
 sorrow alternates with joy, and in a nation whose 
 humour, even, has been supposed to have a serious 
 and Saturnine cast, having heard, too, we may 
 presume, of a text in a certain book which says, 
 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be 
 comforted,' and having himself lost a friend who was 
 as the light of his eyes and the joy of his heart, has 
 not thought it an unworthy employment of his poetic 
 gifts to bestow them in erecting a monument to his 
 friend, upon which he has carved bas-reliefs of 
 exceeding grace and beauty, and has worked delicate 
 flowers into the cornices, and adorned the capitals 
 of the columns with emblematic devices; and upon 
 the summit he has set the statue of his friend, and 
 about the base run the sweetest words of love with 
 the mournfullest accents of grief the darkest doubts 
 with the sublimest hopes. The groans of despair 
 are there, with the triumphant songs of faith, and 
 over all, in letters of gold, surmounting the mingled 
 posies which tell of all the moods of the human mind 
 through its years of mourning, is the scroll on which 
 one reads from afar, ' / am the resurrection and the 
 life? ( Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord. 1 
 
 Cambridge Essays, 1855.
 
 104 ESSAYS. 
 
 WORDSWOBTH'S POEMS. 
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH is generally allowed to 
 have exercised a deeper and more permanent in- 
 fluence upon the literature and modes of thinking 
 of our age, than any of the great poets who lived 
 and wrote during the first quarter of the present 
 century. In proportion as his fame was of slower 
 growth, and his poems were longer in making their 
 way to the understanding and affections of his 
 countrymen, so their roots seem to have struck deeper 
 down, and the crown of glory that encircles his 
 memory is of gold, that has been purified and 
 brightened by the fiery ordeal through which it has 
 passed. Tennyson says of the laureate wreath which 
 he so deservedly wears, that it is 
 
 Greener from the brows 
 Of him who uttered nothing base. 
 
 And this, which seems at first sight negative praise, 
 is, in reality, a proof of exquisite discernment; for
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 105 
 
 it is just that which constitutes the marked distinction 
 between Wordsworth and the other really original 
 poets who are likely to share with him the honour 
 of representing poetically to posterity the early part 
 of the nineteenth century. In their crowns there 
 is alloy, both moral and intellectual. His may not 
 be of so imperial a fashion; the gems that stud it 
 may be less dazzling, but the gold is of ethereal 
 temper, and there is no taint upon his robe. Weak- 
 ness, incompleteness, imperfection, he had, for he was 
 a mortal man of limited faculties, but spotless purity 
 is not to be denied him he uttered nothing base. 
 Our readers will anticipate us in ranking with him, 
 as the representative poets of their age, Byron, Scott, 
 and Shelley. Of each of these we would say a few 
 words, especially in this representative character. 
 
 Lord Byron's poems are the actual life-experience 
 of a man whose birth and fortune enabled him to 
 mix with the highest society, and whose character 
 led him to select for his choice that portion of it 
 which pursued pleasure as the main, if not the sole 
 object of existence. Under a thin disguise of name, 
 country, and outward incident, they present us with 
 the desires which actuated, the passions which 
 agitated, and the characters which were the ideals 
 of the fashionable men and women of the earlier
 
 106 ass AYS. 
 
 part of this century. Limited and monotonous as 
 they are in their essential nature, ringing perpetual 
 changes upon one passion and one phase of passion, 
 the brilliance of their diction, the voluptuous melody 
 of their verse, the picturesque beauty of their scenery, 
 well enough represent that life of the richer classes, 
 which chases with outstretched arms all the Protean 
 forms of pleasure, only to find the subtle essence 
 escape as soon as grasped, leaving behind in its place 
 weariness, disappointment, and joyless stagnation. 
 The loftiest joys they paint are the thrillings of 
 the sense, the raptures of a fine nervous organiza- 
 tion; their pathos is the regret, and their wisdom 
 the languor and the satiety of the jaded voluptuary. 
 These form the staple, the woof of Lord Byron's 
 poetry, and with it is enwoven all that which gives 
 outward variety and incessant stimulating novelty 
 to the pursuits of an Englishman of fashion. These 
 pursuits are as numerous, as absorbing, and demand 
 as much activity of a kind as those of the student 
 or the man of business. Among them will be 
 found those upon which the student and the man 
 of business are employed, though in a different 
 spirit, and with a different aim. Thus we frequently 
 see among the votaries of pleasure men who are 
 fond of literature, of art, of politics, of foreign travel,
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 107 
 
 of all manly and active enterprise; but all these 
 will be pursued, not as duties to be done, in an 
 earnest, hopeful, self-sacrificing spirit, 'that scorns 
 delights and lives laborious days,' but for amusement, 
 for immediate pleasure to be reaped, as a resource 
 against ennui and vacuity, to which none but the 
 weakest and most effeminate nature will succumb. 
 This difference of object and of motive necessitates^ 
 a difference in the value of the results. The soil, 
 which is ploughed superficially, and for a quick 
 return, will bear but frail and fading flowers; the 
 planter of oaks must toil in faith and patience 
 and sublime confidence in the future. And so, into 
 whatever field the wide and restless energies of 
 men like Lord Byron carry them, they bring home 
 no treasures that will endure no marble of which 
 world-lasting statue or palace may be hewn or built 
 no iron, of which world-subduing machines may 
 be wrought. Poems, pictures, history, science, the 
 magnificence and loveliness of Nature, cities of old 
 renown, adventures of desperate excitement, new 
 manners, languages, and characters, supply them 
 with an ever fresh flow of sensation and emotion, 
 keep the senses and the faculties cognate with sense 
 in a pleasant activity, but no well-based general- 
 ization is gained for the understanding; facts are
 
 108 ESSAYS. 
 
 not even carefully observed and honestly studied; 
 pleasant sensation was the object, and that once 
 obtained, there is no more worth in that which 
 produced it, though in it may lie a law of God's 
 manifestation, one of those spiritual facts to know 
 and obey which would seem the chief purpose of 
 man's existence, to discover and make them known, 
 the noblest glory and highest function of genius. 
 It is in this spirit that Lord Byron has questioned 
 Life : ' Oh ! where can pleasure be found ?' and Life, 
 echo-like, would only answer, ' Where !' It is because 
 he put that question more earnestly, lived up to its 
 spirit more fearlessly, and more faithfully and experi- 
 mentally reported the answer, that he is so eminently 
 a representative poet a representative of what a 
 large and important class in every country actually 
 is, of what a far larger class aspires to be. It is in 
 his fearless attempt at solving the problem of life in 
 his own way, his complete discomfiture, and his un- 
 shrinking exhibition of that discomfiture, that the 
 absolute and permanent value of his social teaching 
 consists. For he was endowed with such gifts of 
 nature and of fortune, so highly placed, so made to 
 attract and fascinate, adorned with such beauty and 
 grace, with such splendour of talents, with such 
 quick susceptibility to impressions, with such healthy
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 109 
 
 activity of mind, with such rich flow of speech, 
 with such vast capacity of enjoyment, that no one 
 is likely to make the experiment he made from 
 a higher vantage ground, with more chances of 
 success. And the result of his experience he has 
 given to the world, and has thrown over the whole 
 the charm of a clear, vigorous, animated style, 
 at once masculine, and easy, and polished, spark- 
 ling with beauty, instinct with life, movement, 
 and variety ; by turns calm, voluptuous, impassioned, 
 enthusiastic, terse, and witty, and always most promi- 
 nent that unstudied grace, that Rubens-like facility 
 of touch, which irresistibly impresses the reader with 
 a sense of power, of strength not put fully forth, of 
 resources carelessly flowing out with exhaustless 
 prodigality, not husbanded with timid anxiety and 
 exhibited with pompous ostentation. It is the 
 combination of these qualities of the artist, with his 
 peculiar fearlessness and honesty of avowal his plain, 
 unvarnished expression of what he found pleasant, 
 and chose for his good, that will ever give him a 
 high, if not almost the highest place among the poets 
 of the nineteenth century, even with those readers 
 who perceive and lament the worthlessness of his 
 matter, the superficiality and scantiness of his know- 
 ledge, the want of purity and elevation in his life and
 
 110 ESSAYS. 
 
 character. Those will best appreciate his wonderful 
 talents who are acquainted with the works of his 
 countless imitators, who have admirably succeeded in 
 re-producing his bad morality, his superficial thoughts, 
 and his characterless portraits, without the fervour of 
 his feeling, the keenness of his sensations, the ease 
 and vigour of his language, the flash of his wit, or 
 the knowledge of the world, and the manly common- 
 sense which redeemed and gave value to what else 
 had been entirely worthless. 
 
 If the name of Lord Byron naturally links itself 
 with the fashionable life of great cities ; with circles 
 where men and women live mutually to attract and 
 please each other; where the passions are cherished 
 as stimulants and resources against ennui, are fostered 
 by luxurious idleness, and heightened by all the aids 
 that an old and elaborate material civilization can 
 add to the charms of beauty, and the excitements 
 of brilliant assemblies ; where art and literature are 
 degraded into handmaids and bondslaves of sensu- 
 ality; where the vanity of social distinction fires the 
 tongue of the eloquent speaker, wakens the harp 
 of the poet, colours the canvass of the painter, moulds 
 the manners and sways the actions, directs even the 
 loves and the hatreds of all; no less naturally does 
 the name of Sir Walter Scott stand as the symbol
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. Ill 
 
 and representative of the life and tastes of the country 
 aristocracy, who bear the titles and hold the lands 
 of the feudal barons, and of the country gentlemen 
 whose habits and manners are in such perfect contrast 
 to those of the Squire Westerns to whose places they 
 have succeeded. Possessing in a high degree the 
 active and athletic frame, the robust health, the hardy 
 training, the vigorous nerve, the bold spirit, the frank 
 bearing, and the genial kindness of the gentlemen of 
 the olden time, he could heartily appreciate and un- 
 hesitatingly approve all that time and revolution had 
 spared of feudal dominion and territorial grandeur. 
 The ancient loyalty, so happily tempering the firmness 
 of a principle with the fervour of a feeling, never beat 
 higher in the heart of a cavalier of the seventeenth 
 than in that of the Scottish Advocate of the nine- 
 teenth century. Every one will remember that he 
 refused to write a life of Mary Queen of Scots, because 
 in reference to her conduct, his feelings were at 
 variance with his judgment. And in painting those 
 old times in which his imagination delighted to revel, 
 all that would most have revolted our modern 
 mildness of manners, and shocked our modern sense 
 of justice, was softened down or dropped out of sight, 
 and the nobler features of those ages, their courage, 
 their devotion, their strength and clearness of purpose,
 
 112 US SAYS. 
 
 their marked individuality of character, their im- 
 pulses of heroism and delicacy, their manly enterprise, 
 their picturesque costumes and manners of life, were 
 all brought into bold relief, and placed before the 
 reader with such fulness of detail, in such grandeur 
 of outline, in such bright and vivid colouring, as 
 gave even to the unimaginative a more distinct 
 conception of, and a more lively sympathy with, 
 the past than they could gain for themselves of 
 the present, as it was whirling and roaring round 
 them, confusing them with its shifting of hues and 
 forms, and stunning them with its hurricane of noises. 
 And apart from the fascination which History, so 
 presented, must have for the descendants of men 
 and classes of historical renown, for the hereditary 
 rulers and the privileged families of a great country, 
 and though probably the creator of the splendid 
 pageantry was definitely conscious of no such purpose, 
 yet there must have mingled with this fascination, 
 and have infused into it a deeper and more personal 
 feeling, the regretful sense that the state of society 
 so glowingly depicted had passed away, a fore- 
 boding that even its last vestiges were fast dis- 
 appearing before the wave of democratic equality, 
 and the uprising of a new aristocracy of wealth 
 and intellect. If at the time those famous verse
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 113 
 
 and prose romances came upon the world in a mar- 
 vellously rapid succession, all that the public were 
 conscious of was a blind pleasure and unreflecting 
 delight, it is no less true that in an age of re- 
 volution they raised up before it in a transformed 
 and glorified life the characters, the institutions, 
 the sentiments and manners of an age of absolute 
 government by the strong arm or by divine right 
 of an age of implicit belief, inspiring heroic 
 action, sanctioning romantic tenderness, harmonizing 
 and actuating all the virtues that adorn and elevate 
 fallen humanity; and that since then there has 
 arisen in our country a thoughtful reverence and 
 love for the past a sense of the livingness and 
 value of our history a desire and a determination 
 to appreciate and comprehend, and so not forfeit, 
 the inheritance of wisdom, forethought, brave action, 
 and noble self-denial, which our ancestors have be- 
 queathed to us. How many false and puerile forms 
 this feeling has taken it does not fall within our 
 present scope to notice. In spite of white-waiscoat 
 politics and Pugin pedantries, the feeling is a wise 
 and a noble one one which is the surety and the 
 safeguard of progress ; and that much of it is owing 
 to the interest excited so widely and so deeply by 
 Sir Walter Scott's writings, those will be least 
 
 I
 
 114 ASSAYS. 
 
 disposed to deny who have thought most on the 
 causes which mould a nation's character, and the 
 influences which work out a nation's destiny. 
 
 It is in no fanciful or arbitrary spirit of system 
 that, while we assign to Byron the empire over 
 the world of fashion and of pleasure, and seek the 
 mainspring of Scott's popularity in the sway of 
 old historical traditions over a landed aristocracy, 
 and the longing regret with which they look back 
 to a state of society passed or rapidly passing away, 
 we should regard Shelley as the poetical repre- 
 sentative of those whose hopes and aspirations and 
 affections rush forward to embrace the great Here- 
 after, and dwell in rapturous anticipation on the 
 coming of the golden year, the reign of universal 
 freedom, and the establishment of universal bro- 
 therhood. By nature and by circumstance he was 
 marvellously fitted for his task, gentle, sensitive, 
 and fervid, he shrank from the least touch of wrong, 
 and hated injustice with the zeal and passion of 
 a martyr; while, as if to point him unmistakeably 
 to his mission, and consecrate him by the divine 
 ordination of facts, he was subjected at his first 
 entrance into life to treatment, both from constituted 
 authority and family connexion, so unnecessarily 
 harsh, so stupidly cruel, as would have driven a
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 115 
 
 worse man into reckless dissipation, a weaker man 
 into silent despair. ' Most men,' he says himself, 
 
 Are cradled into poetry by wrong; 
 
 They learn in suffering what they teach in song. 
 
 Whether this be the best or most usual training for 
 the poet may well be doubted, but it is quite indu- 
 bitable that such discipline will soonest open a man's 
 eyes to the evils of existing institutions, and the vices 
 of old societies ; and will lend to his invectives that 
 passion which raises them above satire to his 
 schemes, that enthusiasm which redeems them from 
 being crotchets; will turn his abstract abhorrence of 
 oppression into hatred against the oppressors his 
 loathing of corruption into a withering scorn and 
 contempt for tyrants and their tools, the knaves and 
 hypocrites who use holy names and noble offices to 
 promote their selfish ends, and to fetter and enslave 
 their brother men. And so it happened with Shelley. 
 The feelings of poignant anguish and bitter indig- 
 nation, which had been roused in him by cruelty and 
 injustice towards himself, coloured all his views of 
 society, and at once sharpened his hostility to the 
 civil and religious institutions of his country, and 
 lent more glowing colours to the rainbow of promise 
 that beamed upon him from the distance, through 
 the storm of bloodshed and revolution. Add to this, 
 12
 
 116 US SATS. 
 
 that his mind was ill-trained, and not well furnished 
 with facts ; that he could draw from form, colour, and 
 sound, a voluptuous enjoyment, keener and more in- 
 tense than the grosser animal sensations of ordinary 
 men; that his intellect hungered and thirsted after 
 absolute truth, after central being, after a living 
 personal unity of all things. Thus he united in 
 himself many of the mightiest tendencies of our time 
 its democratic, its sceptical, its pantheistic, its 
 socialistic spirit ; and thus he has become the darling 
 and the watchword of those who aim at reconstructing 
 society, in its forms, in its principles, and in its 
 beliefs, who regard the past as an unmitigated 
 failure, as an entire mistake, who would welcome 
 the deluge for the sake of the new world that would 
 rise after the subsidence of the waters. Nor has their 
 affectionate admiration been ill bestowed. With one 
 exception, a more glorious poet has not been given 
 to the English nation ; and if we make one exception, 
 it is because Shakespeare was a man of profounder 
 insight, of calmer temperament, of wider experience, 
 of more extensive knowledge ; a greater philosopher, 
 in fact, and a wiser man ; not because he possessed 
 more vital heat, more fusing, shaping power of im- 
 agination, or a more genuine poetic impulse and 
 inspiration. After the passions and the theories,
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 117 
 
 which supplied Shelley with the subject-matter of his 
 poems have died away and become mere matters of 
 history, there will still remain a song, such as mortal 
 man never sung before, of inarticulate rapture and of 
 freezing pain, of a blinding light of truth and a 
 dazzling weight of glory, translated into English 
 speech, as coloured as a painted window, as suggestive, 
 as penetrating, as intense as music. 
 
 We have assigned to three great poets of our age 
 the function of representing three classes, distinct in 
 character, position, and taste. But as these classes 
 intermingle and become confused in life, so that 
 individuals may partake of the elements of all three, 
 and, in fact, no one individual can be exactly defined 
 by his class type, so the poets that represent them 
 have, of course, an influence and a popularity that 
 extend far beyond the classes to whose peculiar 
 characteristics and predominant tastes we have as- 
 sumed them to have given form and expression. Men 
 read for amusement, to enlarge the range of their 
 ideas and sympathies, to stimulate the emotions that 
 are sluggish or wearied out ; and thus the poet is not 
 only the interpreter of men and of classes to them- 
 selves, but represents to men characters, modes of life, 
 and social phenomena with which they are before 
 unacquainted, excites interest, and arouses sympathy,
 
 118 us SATS. 
 
 and becomes the reconciler, by causing misunder- 
 standings to vanish, as each man and each class 
 comprehends more fully the common humanity that 
 lies under the special manifestation, the same ele- 
 mental passions and affections, the same wants, the 
 same desires, the same hopes, the same beliefs, the 
 same duties. It is thus especially that poets are 
 teachers, that they aid in strengthening and civilizing 
 nations, in drawing closer the bonds of brotherhood. 
 
 He of whom it is our especial purpose in this 
 article to speak, has said of himself, ' The poet 
 is a teacher. I wish to be considered as a teacher, 
 or as nothing.' If we are asked wherein lay the 
 value of his teaching, we reply, that it lay mainly 
 in the power that was given him of unfolding the 
 glory and the beauty of the material world, and 
 in bringing consciously before the minds of men 
 the high moral function that belonged in the human 
 economy to the imagination, and in thereby redeem- 
 ing the faculties of sense from the comparatively 
 low and servile office of ministering merely to the 
 animal pleasures, or what Mr. Carlyle has called 
 'the beaver inventions.' That beside, and in con- 
 nexion with this, he has shown the possibility of 
 combining a state of vivid enjoyment, even of intense 
 passion, with the activity of thought, and the repose
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 119 
 
 of contemplation. He has, moreover, done more 
 than any poet of his age to break down and ob- 
 literate the conventional barriers that, in our dis- 
 ordered social state, divide rich and poor into two 
 hostile nations ; and he has done this, not by bitter 
 and passionate declamations on the injustice and 
 vices of the rich, and on the wrongs and virtues 
 of the poor, but by fixing his imagination on the 
 elemental feelings, which are the same in all classes, 
 and drawing out the beauty that lies in all that 
 is truly natural in human life. Dirt, squalor, 
 disease, vice, and hard-heartedness, are not natural 
 to any grade of life; where they are found, they 
 are man's work, not God's ; and the poet's business 
 is not with the misery of man's making, but with 
 the escape from that misery revealed to those that 
 have eyes to see, and ears to hear, we mean, 
 that no true poet will be merely a painter of that 
 which is low, deformed, essentially inhuman, as his 
 ultimate and highest aim, though, as means, he may 
 as the greatest poets have done, use them to move 
 and rouse the sleeping soul. This, we say, in 
 answer to those that asserted that Wordsworth was 
 not a true painter of manners and characters from 
 humble life : we say he was, for that he painted, 
 as minutely as served his aim, that which was
 
 120 ESSAYS. 
 
 essential to its occupations and its general outward 
 condition that which it must be, if Christian men 
 are to look upon the inequalities of wealth and 
 station as a permanent element in society. And 
 all this which he taught in his writings, he taught 
 equally by his life. And furthermore, he mani- 
 fested a deep sense of the sacredness of the gift of 
 genius, and refused to barter its free exercise for 
 aught that the world could hold out to him, either 
 to terrify or to seduce ; and he lived to prove, not 
 only that the free exercise of poetic genius is its 
 own exceeding great reward, bringing a rich harvest 
 of joy and peace, and the sweet consciousness of 
 duty well discharged, and God's work done; but, 
 what was quite as much needed in our time, he 
 showed that for the support and nourishment of 
 poetic inspiration, no stimulants of social vanity, 
 vicious sensuality, or extravagant excitement, were 
 requisite, and that it could flourish in the highest 
 vigour on the simple influence of external nature, 
 and the active exercise of the family affections. 
 
 William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, 
 in Cumberland, on April 7th, 1770, the second son 
 of John Wordsworth, attorney and law agent to Sir 
 James Lowther, created Earl of Lonsdale. His 
 mother was a Miss Cookson, of Penrith, and both
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 121 
 
 parents belonged to families of high antiquity and 
 great respectability a fact which may not have been 
 without its influence on the poet's feelings and 
 opinions. Mrs. Wordsworth died when her son was 
 nearly eight years old, but not too early to have 
 discerned in him qualities which made her anxious 
 about his future life, and to impress her with the 
 presentiment that he would be remarkable for good 
 or evil. He himself attributes this feeling of hers to 
 his ' stiff, moody, and violent temper.' 
 
 If however it be true that the child is father to 
 the man, Mrs. Wordsworth had probably better 
 reason for anticipating a remarkable career for her 
 son than was given by any excess of mere boyish 
 obstinacy and self-will. In the fifth book of the 
 Prelude he describes her mode of education as based 
 upon a 
 
 Virtual faith, that He 
 
 Who fills the mother's breast with innocent milk, 
 Doth also for our nobler part provide, 
 Under His great correction and control, 
 As innocent instincts and as innocent food. 
 * * * # * 
 
 This was her creed, and therefore she was pure 
 
 From anxious fear of error or mishap, 
 
 And evil, overweeningly so called, 
 
 Was not puffed up by false unnatural hopes, 
 
 Nor selfish with unnecessary care ; 
 
 Nor with impatience from the season asked 
 
 More than its timely produce ; rather loved
 
 122 ESSAYS. 
 
 The hours for what they are, than from regard 
 Glanced on their promises in restless pride. 
 Such was she not from faculties more strong 
 Than others have, but from the times, perhaps, 
 And spot in which she lived, and through a grace 
 Of modest meekness, simple-mindedness, 
 A heart that found benignity and hope, 
 Being itself benign. 
 
 And so the first peril of childhood was escaped, 
 and that a peril of no small moment, when the child 
 is a genius, and the mother knows it, and ponders 
 it in her heart; the peril of overstimulation of 
 faculties already precociously developed, bringing 
 with it, as its sure result, prodigious vanity and 
 premature exhaustion. Nor were other influences 
 besides those of a wise mother's loving care wanting 
 to train the future poet. The picturesque Derwent, 
 blending with his nurse's song, flowed murmuring 
 along his infant dreams, and composed to more than 
 infant softness his earliest thoughts and sensations. 
 A few years later, the same river was his l tempting 
 playmate.' He would, when five years old, 'make 
 one long bathing of a summer's day,' 'bask in the 
 sun, and plunge, and bask again, alternate.' Happy 
 child! the seed-time of whose soul can thus be 
 entrusted to God and Nature. Wise mother! who 
 knows how to aid, without superseding natural in- 
 fluences and instinctive tendencies to let the child
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 123 
 
 grow at its natural pace, and in its natural direction 
 not to raise it upon stilts, or straiten it in stays. 
 How much wiser would the manhood of many of us 
 be, if our childhood had been more joyous and less 
 trammelled, less made to bend to the whims, sys- 
 tems, or caprices of the elderly pedants about us. 
 We of course know that children are not diminutive 
 angels, and need both instruction and correction; 
 but we believe every sensible mother in the three 
 kingdoms will go with us in an avowal of a decided 
 preference for troublesome, ill-behaved children, over 
 the good little boys and girls, who know the elements 
 of all the ologies, and can define many of the isms 
 who never dirty their pinafores, and decline eating 
 their dinners till grace has been said. To return 
 to William Wordsworth. Another influence, that 
 was to endure, and colour his whole life, had already 
 begun to act upon him. His sister Dorothy was two 
 years younger than himself; the part she played in 
 the formation of his character he exquisitely describes 
 in his poem to the ' Sparrow's Nest': 
 
 The blessing of my later years 
 Was -with me when a hoy. 
 She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 
 And humble cares, and delicate fears ; 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; 
 And love, and thought, and joy.
 
 124 ESSAYS, 
 
 But one "blow carried off the mother and sepa- 
 rated brother and sister the latter went to reside 
 with her maternal relations : the former was sent 
 to school at Hawkeshead, near the lake of Esthwaite. 
 He had already been instructed in the rudiments of 
 learning at Cockermouth by the Rev. Mr. Gilbanks ; 
 and his father, who is said to have been a person 
 of considerable mental vigour and eloquence, had 
 contributed to his education, by setting him very 
 early to learn passages from the best English poets 
 by heart, so that he could repeat large portions 
 of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser. It was pro- 
 bably no great misfortune for Wordsworth that the 
 north country schools did not pay that attention to 
 classical composition which enables Eton, Rugby, 
 Shrewsbury, and our other great public schools, 
 to send up men to the Universities who can 
 write Greek with the purity of Xenophon, and 
 Latin with the elegance of Cicero. At any rate, 
 such was the case; and the only learning he seems 
 to have acquired at Hawkeshead was a fair know- 
 ledge of Latin, and an acquaintance with the elements 
 of mathematics. But he tells us that his school 
 days were very happy, chiefly because then, and 
 in the vacations, he was left at liberty to read 
 whatever books he liked. He instances Fielding,
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 125 
 
 Cervantes, Le Sage, and Swift; and particularizes 
 Gulliver s Travels and the Tale of a Tub as being 
 much to his taste. The readers of the Prelude, 
 need not be told that his real education at school 
 lay neither in the study of Latin, nor in the perusal 
 of the works of the humorists, which exercised 
 little apparent influence upon the formation of his 
 tastes, or the character of his subsequent writings. 
 Already that strong individuality had displayed itself, 
 which was to issue in the conquest of new fields 
 for the creative energy of the poet, of a new 
 poetical philosophy for the analysis of the critic. 
 Already in the pursuit of his boyish amusements 
 in springing woodcocks in autumn, in taking 
 nests in spring, in skating on the frozen lake of 
 Esthwaite, or rowing on bright half-holidays with 
 his companions along l the plain of Windermere,' 
 he had begun to feel the presence of Nature in 
 the sky and on the earth; already had he become 
 a worshipper in that shrine, of which he afterwards 
 was the acknowledged high-priest. 
 
 It would be as sacrilegious, as it is unnecessary, 
 to translate into bald prose those high-coloured and 
 nobly musical passages of the Prelude, in which he 
 traces the influence of the grand and beautiful scenery 
 amid which his school-days were fortunately passed,
 
 126 ESSAYS. 
 
 in awakening his sensibility, in associating his animal 
 sensations with outward objects, that were mag- 
 nificent and lovely, and so ministering to genial and 
 happy moods of mind, by the constant supply of pure 
 and ennobling pleasures. As pleasurable excitement 
 is almost the necessary condition of poetical activity, 
 too much importance can hardly be attributed to the 
 circumstances which secured to Wordsworth, in his 
 most plastic time of life, an unfailing flow of joyous 
 spirits from purely elevating sources, and preserved 
 him, while reason was yet undeveloped, and self- 
 command had not yet become a habit, from those 
 temptations to coarse pleasures, and even gross vices, 
 which form so weighty a counterpoise to the scholar- 
 ship and manly training of our great public schools. 
 Nor was this awakening passion for nature less effi- 
 cacious or important in thus early laying the found- 
 ation of those habits of observation and reflection 
 which not only supplied him through life with his 
 matter for poetical composition, but freed him from 
 that necessity for companionship and conversation 
 which weakens the character, and fritters away the 
 strength of so many men of genius. Wordsworth, 
 even as a boy, was self-sufficing and independent ; 
 solitude to him was blithe society, though no one 
 took more interest in boyish sports, or speaks with
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 127 
 
 more affectionate remembrance of boyish friendships. 
 
 / J. 
 
 What helped to this was the usual degree in which 
 a genuine poetic activity was conjoined with, and 
 awakened by, his receptive sensibility. l A plastic 
 power, ' he tells us, 
 
 Abode with me; a forming hand, at times 
 Rebellious, acting in a devious mood; 
 A local spirit of his own, at war 
 With general tendency ; but, for the most, 
 Subservient strictly to external things, 
 With which it communed. An auxiliar light 
 Came from my mind, which on the setting sun 
 Bestowed new splendour; the melodious birds, 
 The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on 
 Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed 
 A like dominion; and the midnight storm 
 Grew darker in the presence of my eye. 
 
 The prominence which is given in Wordsworth's 
 poetry to this reciprocal action of external nature and 
 the mind of man, is that which mainly distinguishes 
 him from, and raises him above, merely descriptive 
 or merely didactic poets. Nature to him was not 
 a canvas variously coloured, from which he was to 
 select what soothed or excited the sense, and paint 
 in words what was given to him from without; nor 
 was man an incarnate intellect whose senses were 
 merely channels of communication between his animal 
 wants and the material objects which supplied them, 
 or, at best, purveyors for the fancy in her airy dreams
 
 128 ESSAYS. 
 
 and unreal analogies ; but the one was related to 
 the other by a vital and organic union, which 
 admitted of no severance, but to the detriment, if not 
 the destruction of moral and spiritual life. Nature 
 was to him a mystic book, written by the finger of 
 God, whose characters were indeed discernible by the 
 senses, but whose meaning was only to be deciphered 
 by the imagination 
 
 By observation of affinities 
 
 In objects where no brotherhood exists 
 
 To passive minds. 
 
 The book of Nature and the world of imagination 
 are phrases, indeed, that have long been favourites 
 with men of sensibility and men of science; but 
 the truths that have been read in the one have 
 usually been generalizations of the analytic under- 
 standing, or the facts upon which such generalizations 
 are founded, while the other has been soothed upon 
 as peopled only by chimeras, and given up to the 
 visionary and the dreamer. Mr. Wordsworth's 
 originality in this matter consists in his assertion of 
 a science of appearances, speaking through the senses 
 to the heart and soul, acting on and acted upon by 
 the imagination, in accordance with laws, which it 
 is the poet's business to discover and obey , and not 
 simply in this assertion of a philosophy of aesthetic,
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 129 
 
 which would justify such expressions as the 'sensuous 
 false and true,' in opposition to the pure idealist 
 theory of the falseness of all sensuous preception; 
 but furthermore and mainly in the importance he 
 attaches to a right understanding of this science 
 for the production of genuine poetry, and a practical 
 obedience to it for the building up of the moral 
 being of the individual man. Whether his con- 
 clusions on this point are the result of what he 
 possessed in common with all men, or of the ex- 
 ceptional predominance, of the imaginative activity 
 in him, may perhaps admit of discussion. Certain 
 it is, that more than almost any poet, he was 
 from childhood ' of imagination all compact,' and 
 equally certain is it that, unless social arrangements 
 can be totally altered, it is hard to see how the 
 bulk of our population can be placed in circum- 
 stances at all admitting, not to say favourable to, 
 the cultivation of the imaginative power; while to 
 suppose them for this reason debarred from at- 
 taining moral and religious excellence, would indeed 
 sadden our prospects for the future, change all our 
 boasted civilization to a diabolic delusion, and justify 
 any schemes, however extravagant, that promised to 
 relieve our upper classes from so heinous a crime, and 
 our lower classes of towns and cities, and in spite of 
 
 K
 
 130 ESSAYS. 
 
 Mr. Wordsworth, the majority of our peasants, from 
 so dire a destruction. This theory of the function 
 of imagination in the human economy, and of the 
 function of external nature in awakening and evoking 
 its power, is so prominent in all Mr. Wordsworth's 
 higher poetry is so much the key-note to what his 
 earlier critics called his mysticism and affected 
 raptures, that we have felt it necessary to allude to 
 it somewhat at length, though to handle it at all 
 adequately would require a philosophical treatise, 
 which has never yet been written, though often talked 
 about. As originating in his own boyish experiences, 
 it properly belonged to this part of our subject, and 
 may further be taken as an instance of the limitation 
 which is necessary in applying any of Mr. Words- 
 worth's theories of society. They are all personal 
 experiences thrown into the form of general truths, 
 with that strength of phrase and colour of passion 
 which belong to an essentially subjective view. 
 
 We may conclude these records of Wordsworth's 
 schoolboy experience by mentioning that he was 
 already a poet actual as well as potential, and that 
 a copy of verses in heroic metre, written by him in 
 his fourteenth or fifteenth year (it is rather doubtful 
 which), on the second centenary from the found- 
 ation of the school by Archbishop Sandys, is pre-
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 131 
 
 served; of which, though the poet himself speaks 
 slightingly, as a tame imitation of Pope's versifica- 
 tion, and a little in his style, it is not too much 
 to say that very few boys of that age could have 
 possibly written them. 
 
 His father had died while William was yet a 
 schoolboy, in the year 1783. Lord Lonsdale, 
 whose agent he was, refused to settle his accounts, 
 and the sum of which the children, four sons and 
 one daughter, were thus deprived, was the bulk 
 of their fortune. It was afterwards paid in 1802, 
 with interest, by the second Earl of Lonsdale ; but 
 meanwhile, the family of the Wordsworths were 
 dependent upon their relations, and William was 
 sent by his uncles, Richard Wordsworth and Chris- 
 topher Crackenthorpe, in the year 1787, to St. John's 
 College, Cambridge. 
 
 From what has been stated of William Words- 
 worth's studies, attainments, character, and tastes, 
 while he was at Hawkshead, no reasonable surprise 
 can be entertained that the pursuits, the honours, 
 and the emoluments of Cambridge failed to excite 
 his industry or stimulate his ambition. The ex- 
 cellence to which the University at that time confined 
 her rewards and distinctions was limited within the 
 range of mathematics, pure and applied, and that 
 K2
 
 132 USSAYS. 
 
 highly valuable, but by no means comprehensive 
 scholarship, which is expressed by the phrase, a 
 knowledge of Latin and Greek; what is excluded 
 being simply the literature, the philosophy and the 
 history of the two great model nations, and what is 
 included being the power of translating correctly at 
 sight, and of composing in prose and verse. We 
 say at that time, because, though very little extension 
 has actually taken place, yet a new and enlarged 
 system has just come into operation, from which the 
 most beneficial results on national education are to 
 be expected. Moreover, Wordsworth went to a 
 college which is now especially, and was, we believe, 
 exclusively devoted to the study of mathematics. It 
 is more than possible that those men in whom taste 
 and imagination are predominant are, as the learned 
 Master of Trinity would maintain, the very men who 
 would profit most by the rigid processes and absolute 
 results of mathematics ; poets have themselves been 
 famous for saying and writing fine things about the 
 beauty of mathematical demonstrations, and the 
 winning charms of pure truth ; Wordsworth has made 
 Euclid's Elements the subject of an exquisite episode 
 in his autobiographical poem ; but equally certain it 
 is that either in cautious self-denial, fearing to be 
 hooked for life by the too seducing bait of the Lady
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS 133 
 
 of lines and angles, or that the brightness of her 
 heavenly glory should dazzle them into blindness, 
 or scorch them, into annihilation, or from some other 
 cause equally powerful, poets generally content them- 
 selves with singing the praises of the sublime and 
 starry science, and leave to others the profit and 
 the praise of worshipping in her temple, and as- 
 suming the robes and crown of her hierophants. 
 Wordsworth was no exception, no trace of his 
 mathematical studies appears in the records of his 
 college life, no result beyond that of an ordinary 
 B.A. degree appears to have attended them. The 
 only positive result of his Cambridge reading seems 
 to be the acquisition of Italian. We are not aware 
 that he ever regretted his neglect of University 
 studies, though his nephew implies as much, found- 
 ing his belief on an exhortation addressed, we 
 presume, to himself by his uncle, on the importance 
 of mastering the classical writers before coming to 
 the modern; and in a letter addressed to the son 
 of a friend, regretting that he had given up reading 
 for honours. We would suggest to Dr. Christopher 
 Wordsworth that his uncle might see good reason 
 for advising him to confine his attention to that 
 which constituted his path to distinction, without 
 at all regretting the deliberate choice of his own
 
 134 ESSAYS. 
 
 life, or implying the general advisability of the 
 course he recommended to one young man of sin- 
 gularly academic mind and character. But this is 
 only a specimen of the way in which the nephew 
 has reflected his own likeness upon the canvas 
 prepared for his uncle. But to return to the poet. 
 Cambridge seems to have done nothing for him ; 
 not only were the studies of the place distasteful 
 to him, but the country was eminently disqualified 
 for exciting, or even sustaining, the poetic suscep- 
 tibility of one who had been, up to that time, 
 a free wanderer among the hills and vales and 
 lakes of lovely, romantic Westmoreland. Even 
 Wordsworth, with his creative gift, failed to gain 
 an insight into what there is in that flat, fenny 
 district capable of conversion into exquisite poetry. 
 That conquest has been achieved by a younger 
 poet ; and now and henceforth, l Mariana in the 
 moated Grange,' and the 'Dying Swan,' stand to 
 give the lie to any one who dares to call Cam- 
 bridge and Lincoln utterly barren of nourishment 
 for minds which crave external beauty, or languish 
 and sicken from starvation. We may add, from 
 personal acquaintance, that these flat counties are 
 famous for their glorious sunsets. But Words- 
 worth's heart was all the time among his mountains
 
 WORDS WORTH 'S POEMS. 135 
 
 and his waterfalls; the. Cam to him was specifically 
 the silent Cam; and but for his vacations, the 
 poetic spirit would have "been imperilled. By these, 
 his love and intense enjoyment of nature were 
 sustained, enhanced by months of absence and 
 longing and regret; and with them began now to 
 appear another range of faculties, called into ex- 
 ercise by the varieties of character his Cambridge 
 life presented to him, and the contrast it afforded 
 to the life he had left behind him. He began now 
 to take that interest in observing the passions, 
 characters, and actions of the men and women around 
 him, which, supplying him with the incidents, the 
 feelings, and, to some extent, with the very language 
 of his most original minor poems, finally enabled 
 him to rear the noblest edifice of modern song, 
 where, uniting in himself the philosophical breadth 
 of Coleridge with the minute touches and more 
 than the homely pathos of Crabbe, he forms into 
 one organic whole the profoundest speculations on 
 society with the simplest annals of the poor. It 
 is only a proof of the exceeding purity and elevation 
 of his character, that he finds ground for mild 
 self-reproach in the innocent enjoyment of rustic 
 balls and innocent flirtations 'love-likings,' as he 
 prettily calls them with rustic belles, which seem
 
 136 ESSAYS. 
 
 to have partially occupied his first long vacation. 
 Truth to say, we wish he had taken a more lively 
 interest in such matters. The absence of this 
 side of human nature from Wordsworth's poetry 
 imparts to it a heaviness, a monotony, which repels 
 the young and the worldly, to whose minds his 
 lofty wisdom and his noble seriousness might per- 
 chance find admission and welcome. But great 
 men are not to be fashioned after our will, but 
 according to the ordering of Him who sends them 
 to do his work in the world ; and special work 
 demands a special training. It is only this con- 
 sideration that prevents us from seriously regret- 
 ting that Wordsworth did not, as a young man, 
 join more heartily in what are commonly called 
 the pleasures of the world. There can be no 
 doubt that, had he done so, he would have ex- 
 erted an earlier and a wider influence on society; 
 he would have understood better the pursuits and the 
 pleasures of the men and women of cities ; he would 
 have sympathized more with the life of the burgher 
 classes. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten 
 that, in that case, he would scarcely have so fasci- 
 nated and controlled the 'fit audience, though few,' 
 whom no one ever asked for more sincerely or more 
 successfully; his poetical creed would scarcely, in
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 137 
 
 that case, have had its apostles, its martyrs, its 
 confessors; it would not have been so fiercely com- 
 bated, and would not therefore have exhibited such 
 a marked triumph of truth, have been rooted so 
 deeply in the conviction of its votaries. Had his 
 genius, again, played more upon the surface of society, 
 dealt more with the passions and the vanities of men 
 congregated together, it might have lost something 
 of that depth, of that permanent and elemental 
 character that now renders his reflections and specu- 
 lations so valuable and interesting to minds at all 
 kindred to his own. Nor is it easy to conceive the 
 simplicity and calm of Wordsworth's life and cha- 
 racter failing to unfit him for fairly estimating 
 English middle-class life and people, with their 
 multiform bustle, their eager pursuit of wealth, their 
 love and need of outward excitement. With all his 
 greatness, he was neither Shakespeare nor Goethe; 
 and probably had he striven for manysidedness, he 
 would have been less than he was. And so, recalling 
 our half-formed expression of regret, we may accept 
 the fact, in all thankfulness and humility, that he 
 soon gave up the chase of trivial pleasures, and 
 returned to where his deeper passion lay ; though, as 
 we have hinted above, these trivial pleasures of his 
 Cambridge and vacation life were, in all probability,
 
 138 ESSAYS. 
 
 the appointed means of evoking that meditative ob- 
 servation of men and character, which makes his 
 poetry no less rich in wisdom than in beauty and 
 feeling. One special occasion he notes, when, after 
 being all night at a country ball, his whole being 
 was stirred within him, as 
 
 Magnificent 
 The morning rose in memorable pomp ; 
 
 and there came upon him one of those crises, so 
 marked in the history of great minds, which colour 
 the whole after-course of existence. ' To the brim,' 
 he says, 
 
 My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows 
 Were then made for me; bond unknown to me 
 "Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
 A dedicated Spirit. On I walked 
 In thankful blessedness, which yet survives. 
 
 And to this consecration, the silent influences of the 
 morning, poured upon his head by the invisible hand, 
 he remained faithful as few priests have ever been 
 to their calling. What the world has gained by his 
 loyalty is to be seen in his works; what he might 
 otherwise have become, may be gathered from those 
 parts of the Prelude in which he records his 
 Cambridge and London experience, especially from 
 that magnificent passage where, describing his general 
 impression of University life, he clothes the stern
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 139 
 
 denunciation of a Juvenal in language as strong as 
 Dryden's, as rich, sensuous, and full of meaning as 
 Shakespeare's : 
 
 All degrees 
 
 And shapes of spurious fame and short-lived praise 
 Here sate in state, and fed with daily alms 
 Retainers won away from solid good; 
 And here was Labour, his own bond-slave ; Hope, 
 That never set the pain against the prize ; 
 Idleness, halting with his weary clog, 
 And poor misguided Shame, and witless Fear, 
 And simple Pleasure, foraging for Death ; 
 Honour misplaced, and Dignity astray ; 
 Feuds, factions, flatteries, enmity, and guile, 
 Murmuring submission, and bald government 
 (The idol weak as the idolator), 
 And Decency and Custom starving Truth, 
 And blind Authority beating with his staff 
 The child that might have led him; Emptiness 
 Followed as of good omen, and meek Worth, 
 Left to herself, unheard of and unknown. 
 
 In connexion with this noble passage, showing 
 what Wordsworth could have done had he chosen to 
 cultivate the higher form of satire, it is interesting to 
 find him afterwards declining to allow the publication 
 of some imitations of Juvenal, executed as a young 
 man, though solicited by his friend Archdeacon 
 Wrangham, and basing his refusal on moral objections 
 to the lowering influence of this species of com- 
 position. 
 
 Wordsworth's last long vacation was spent in
 
 140 USSAYS. 
 
 travelling abroad with his friend Mr. Jones. The 
 tourists landed at Calais on July 13th, 1790, the 
 eve of the day when Louis XVI. took the oath of 
 fidelity to the new constitution; proceeded princi- 
 pally on foot through France, Savoy, Piedmont, 
 North Italy, Switzerland, and up the Rhine, re- 
 turning in time for the Cambridge October term. 
 The poem entitled 'Descriptive Sketches,' is the 
 record of this continental tour. A more important 
 result of it was the warmer sympathy it excited 
 in young Wordsworth with the then fair promise 
 and exulting hopes of the French revolution. In 
 a letter to his sister Dorothy, from the Lake of 
 Constance, he speaks in enthusiastic terms of the 
 French as compared with the Swiss, adding, 'But 
 I must remind you that we crossed at the time 
 when the whole nation was mad with joy, in con- 
 sequence of the revolution. It was a most interest- 
 ing period to be in France ; and we had many 
 delightful scenes where the interest of the picture 
 was owing solely to this cause.' It is more than 
 ever superfluous for us, who have since that time 
 been witness to two French revolutions, and the 
 enthusiastic hope they excited, with the miserable 
 disappointment that has in each case ensued, to go 
 far in search of reasons to justify or explain the
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 141 
 
 sympathy which Wordsworth, in common with all 
 the generous-hearted young men of his day, felt and 
 expressed with the first and greatest of the demo- 
 cratic convulsions which have since been constantly 
 working to upheave and alter the surface of European 
 society. The man who at that time had not so 
 sympathized must have been duller than an owl, 
 or wiser than an angel. It is sufficient here to 
 observe, that when the French revolution departed 
 from its first love and its first faith, and developed 
 into that hybrid monster of cruelty, tyranny, and 
 licentiousness, which made the despotism of the 
 Empire a welcome refuge, Wordsworth was not 
 misled by the vanity of consistency, or dazzled 
 by the splendour of military achievement, to tolerate 
 its excesses and palliate its crimes. Meanwhile, 
 till that period arrived, he welcomed the advent 
 of the people's triumphs with enthusiastic faith 
 and joy. 
 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven! 
 
 He took his degree in January 1791, and in 
 November of the same year we find him returning to 
 France, which he did not again quit till the close of 
 the following year. A considerable portion of this 
 period he spent at Orleans and Blois. His most
 
 142 USSATS. 
 
 intimate friend was General Beaupuis, whose character 
 as philosopher, patriot, and soldier, was eminently 
 calculated to attract the admiration of a young and 
 ardent poetic mind. How deep was the impression 
 made upon him during these eventful months, and 
 how keenly he sympathized with each new phase 
 of the popular movement, is stamped alike upon his 
 earlier and later poems; and manifests itself equally 
 in the glowing passion of his hopes, and in the 
 indignant bitterness of his disappointment. A purer 
 passion never warmed the heart of patriot or poet. 
 
 It was probably fortunate for him that circum- 
 stances we presume the want of money compelled 
 him to return to England at the close of the year, as 
 he was intimately connected with the Brissotins, and 
 might have shared their destruction, had he stayed 
 till the following May. 'William,' says his sister, 
 in a letter of the 22nd December, 1792, 'is in 
 London; he writes to me regularly, and is a most 
 affectionate brother.' 
 
 The extent to which his political opinions were 
 at this time identified with the principles of the 
 French revolution, may be gathered from an un- 
 published pamphlet, entitled, ' A Letter to the 
 Bishop of Llandaff on the political principles con- 
 tained in an appendix to one of his lordship's recent
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 143 
 
 sermons,' and from a letter to a friend named 
 Matthews. He disapproves of hereditary monarchy, 
 hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every 
 species, as necessarily counteracting the progress of 
 human improvement; and holds that even social 
 privileges and distinctions should be conferred by 
 the elective voice of the people. He emphatically 
 declares himself not an admirer of the British con- 
 stitution. ' Yet,' he adds 
 
 In my ardour to attain the goal, I do not forget the nature of the 
 ground where the race is to be run. The destruction of those institu- 
 tions which I condemn, appears to me to be hastening on too rapidly. 
 I recoil from the very idea of a revolution. I am a determined enemy 
 to every species of violence. I see no connexion, but what the 
 obstinacy of pride and ignorance renders necessary, between justice 
 and the sword, between reason and bonds. I deplore the miser- 
 able condition of the French, and think that we can only be guarded 
 
 from the same scourge by the undaunted efforts of good men 
 
 I severely condemn all inflammatory addresses to the passions of 
 men. I know that the multitude walk in darkness. I would put 
 into each man's hands a lantern, to guide him ; and not have him to 
 set out upon his journey depending for illumination on abortive 
 flashes of lightning, or the coruscations of transitory meteors. 
 
 With principles so decidedly republican, and 
 sentiments so opposed to violence, physical force, 
 or even inflammatory agitation ; with such a clear 
 consciousness of the necessity of knowledge and 
 virtue, as the only basis and safeguard of popular 
 liberties, a clear-sighted observer might even thus
 
 144 ESSAYS. 
 
 early have anticipated the course of Wordsworth's 
 opinions on the French revolution, and on politics, 
 practical and speculative, 'in general. The im- 
 mediate effect of his disappointment was to cloud 
 his hopes and weaken his faith in human nature ; 
 and his painful feelings were still farther em- 
 bittered, and clashing sympathies jarred the more 
 harshly within him, when, in consequence of the 
 execution of Louis XVI., this country declared war 
 against France. During the year 1793, he published 
 the poems entitled, ' The Evening Walk,' and ' De- 
 scriptive Sketches,' the latter of which he had 
 composed principally in his walks along the banks 
 of the Loire the preceding summer. Interesting 
 as these poems are in themselves, as the first-fruits 
 of an original genius, they are more important as 
 having in the following year attracted the attention 
 of Coleridge, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, 
 and having thus laid the foundations of an intimacy 
 which exercised a powerful influence upon these two 
 great men, and contributed to enrich and expand 
 their minds, no less than it ministered to the enjoy- 
 ments of both. ' Seldom, if ever,' says Coleridge 
 in the Biographia Literaria, 'was the emergence 
 of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon 
 more evidently announced.' But poetry can never
 
 WORDSWORTH* 'S POEMS. 145 
 
 be counted on as a means of support ; and hitherto 
 Wordsworth had been almost wholly dependent on 
 his relations, the debt to his father's estate from 
 Lord Lonsdale not having been yet recovered. He 
 was therefore urged to make choice of a profession; 
 or rather, the Church was pointed out as the only 
 one open to him. In spite, however, of remonstrating 
 relatives and an empty purse, he resolved not to 
 take orders. The consequence naturally was, that 
 relatives from remonstrance turned to indignation 
 and coldness, and the purse was not likely to fill 
 itself. As a means of accomplishing this desirable 
 object, he proposed to his friend Matthews, then 
 engaged on a London newspaper, to join him in 
 a monthly periodical, to be called the Philanthropist, 
 the principles of which were to be republican, but 
 not revolutionary. He was himself to contribute 
 to it criticisms on poetry, painting, gardening, &c., 
 besides essays on morals and politics. The scheme, 
 however, came to nothing, and his next attempt was 
 to secure employment on a London paper, only con- 
 ditioning that it should be an opposition paper ; l for,' 
 says he, 1 1 cannot abet, in the smallest degree, the 
 measures pursued by the present ministry ;' adding, 
 at the same time, l I know that many good men are 
 persuaded of the expediency of the present war.' 
 
 L
 
 146 ESSAYS. 
 
 He was at this time engaged in attendance on the 
 sick-bed of a young friend, Raisley Calvert, who was 
 dying of consumption. Before the newspaper en- 
 gagement was actually concluded, this young man 
 (who was wise enough to discern Wordsworth's 
 genius, and was impressed with the persuasion that, 
 if not impeded by the necessity of other occupations, 
 he would benefit mankind by his writings) died, and 
 left to his friend the sum of nine hundred pounds. 
 Thus relieved from all immediate care, he gave 
 himself entirely to his poetic impulse, and devoted 
 himself with unswerving aim and untiring energy 
 to what he felt to be his appointed task. This 
 bold step was justified, not only by the clearness of 
 purpose and consciousness of power which prompted 
 it, but by the abstemious habits and simple tastes 
 which are so often wanting in poets. Writing some 
 time afterwards to Sir George Beaumont, he says, 
 'Upon the interest of the 900, 400. being laid 
 out in annuity, with 200. deducted from the prin- 
 cipal, and 100., legacy to my sister, and a 100. 
 more which the Lyrical Ballads have brought me, 
 my sister and I contrived to live seven years 
 nearly eight.' People who can so live may follow 
 the promptings of genius without the imputation of 
 folly, rashness, or vain self-confidence. The legacy
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 147 
 
 came to Wordsworth in the early part of 1795, 
 and in the autumn of that year, he and his sister, 
 who thenceforth was his constant companion, were 
 settled at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in 
 Dorsetshire. It was here that he composed the 
 imitations of Juvenal, alluded to before, and the 
 tragedy of the Borderers, which, after being offered 
 to Mr. Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, and 
 by him declined, remained in MS. till the year 
 1842. Wordsworth assigns it to his sister's benign 
 influence upon him during this period, that he was 
 saved from lasting despondency, consequent upon 
 the failure of his political hopes. Depressed in 
 heart, bewildered in intellect, in danger even of 
 letting slip the great saving truths of Reason, and 
 taking refuge in abstract Science from the scoffing 
 Spirit by which a man revenges himself on his own 
 delusions, he thanks 
 
 The bounteous Giver of all good, 
 That the beloved sister in whose sight 
 Those days were passed * * 
 
 ***** 
 
 Maintained for me a saving intercourse 
 With my true self * * * 
 
 ***** 
 
 She, in the midst of all, preserved me still 
 A poet, made me seek beneath that name, 
 And that alone, my office upon earth. 
 
 How complete was the recovery of the poet under 
 L2
 
 148 ESSAYS. 
 
 the humanizing and tranquillizing influence of this 
 loving and beloved sister, is seen from an interest- 
 ing passage in the Biographia Literaria. Speaking 
 of his residence at Stowey, Coleridge says, ( I was 
 so fortunate as to acquire, shortly after my settle- 
 ment there, an invaluable blessing in the society and 
 neighbourhood of one, to whom I could look up 
 with equal reverence, whether I regarded him as 
 a poet, a philosopher, or a man. His conversation 
 extended to almost all subjects, except physics and 
 politics; with the latter he never troubled himself' 
 A short time previous to the removal of Wordsworth 
 and his sister to Alfoxden, in the neighbourhood of 
 Stowey, mentioned in the above passage, Coleridge 
 had paid them a visit at Racedown; and in a letter 
 from that place to Cottle, he says of Wordsworth, 
 { I speak with heartfelt sincerity, and I think 
 unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel 
 a little man by his side.' Miss Wordsworth he 
 describes to the same friend in terms of warm and 
 eloquent admiration. 
 
 She is a woman indeed, in mind, I mean, and in heart; for her 
 person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would 
 think her ordinary ; if you expected to see an ordinary woman you 
 would think her pretty, hut her manners are simple, ardent, im- 
 pressive. In every motion her innocent soul out-beams so brightly, 
 that who saw her would say ' Guilt was a thing impossible with her.' 
 Her information various ; her eye watchful in minutest observation of 
 Nature ; and her taste a perfect electrometer.
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 149 
 
 On the side of the Wordsworths the impression 
 made by Coleridge was equally favourable, and their 
 removal to Alfoxden was mainly induced by their 
 desire to enjoy his society. The residence at 
 Alfoxden commenced in July 1797, and the twelve- 
 month that he passed there he describes as ' a very 
 pleasant and productive time of his life.' Indeed, 
 in that year, with the exception of the ' Female 
 Vagrant,' all the poems contained in the first edition 
 of the Lyrical Ballads were composed. To the same 
 period ' Peter Bell ' is due, though it was not pub- 
 lished till 1819. How the Lyrical Ballads were 
 a joint projection of Wordsworth and Coleridge 
 the aim with which they were written the principles 
 which dictated their choice of subjects and style of 
 diction and how Coleridge was not so industrious 
 as his coadjutor and that the book was finally 
 published by Cottle of Bristol, in the summer of 
 1798, in a duodecimo volume moreover, that the 
 reviews were terribly severe, and that of five hundred 
 copies the greater number were sold as remainder 
 at a loss, are all stale topics to the readers of the 
 Biographia Literaria and Cottle's Reminiscences. 
 Wordsworth received thirty guineas for his share of 
 the copyright, which was, with Mr. Cottle's other 
 literary property, subsequently transferred to Messrs.
 
 150 JSSSAYS. 
 
 Longman, who estimating this particular article at 
 nil, returned it, at Mr. Cottle's request, and it was 
 by him presented to the authors. This, it must be 
 confessed, was a singular reception for a volume 
 which, however the public taste was repelled by some 
 of its contents, yet gave to the light Coleridge's 
 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Nightingale,' with Words- 
 worth's ' Lines left upon a Yew-tree seat' and ' Tintern 
 Abbey,' four poems, of which it is not too much to 
 say, that since Milton's voice had ceased, such noble 
 strains had not been uttered in English speech. The 
 famous Preface, to which Coleridge justly, we think, 
 attributes much of the acrimony with which the 
 Lake-school of poetry, as it came afterwards to be 
 called, was assailed, was not published till the Lyrical 
 Ballads reached a second edition, and were augmented 
 by an additional volume; so that the public neglect 
 and the severity of the critics must be explained by 
 the poems themselves, and not by revolutionary 
 views of poetic composition, systematically and, it 
 must be owned, somewhat dogmatically announced. 
 These views, and the productions which were the 
 result of them, have been the subject of controversy 
 and discussion from that time to this; the ablest 
 critics and the greatest poets have borne part in it. 
 The issue may, we think, be fairly stated to be, that
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 151 
 
 the theory, considered as polemic in reference to the 
 style of poetry of which Pope's translation of Homer 
 is the type and highest example, is perfectly suc- 
 cessful and generally received; that the agitation to 
 which it gave rise has had great influence in winning 
 men back to perceive the material that lies ready for 
 the poet's use in our actual daily life, and, as a neces- 
 sary consequence, to bring poetic language nearer to 
 the actual phraseology of human beings in a state 
 of passion or vivid emotion ; but that, on the other 
 hand, the theory was wanting both in compre- 
 hensiveness of knowledge, in subtlety of analysis 
 and catholicity of taste that, in a word, it was little 
 more than polemic; while the poems composed ex- 
 pressly to support, or at least under the definite and 
 conscious influence of the theory, are just those in 
 which Wordsworth falls farthest below himself, and 
 which, even now that his name is honoured by the 
 wise and good, and his seat is among the immortals, 
 are regarded by all but a very few, and those for the 
 most part persons who were in some way connected 
 with him, as experiments which, though they in no 
 wise detract from his fame, have added no laurel to 
 his wreath. In fact, the best refutation of Mr. 
 Wordsworth's theory, considered as anything more 
 than a corrective of an excess in the opposite
 
 152 JESS ATS. 
 
 direction, is furnished by those poems of his own, 
 in which he follows the natural bent of his genius, 
 unwarped by system that is, in at least nine-tenths 
 of his published works. And there, whether it 
 be the play of the fancy, the overflow of affection, 
 the visionary power of imagination, or the reason's 
 rapture of intuition, that colours his mental activity 
 and stirs his heart and tongue, the matter is the 
 life-stuff of a great original genius, and the language 
 and versification such as speak the faculty and 
 the education of an artist. Mr. Coleridge puts the 
 matter in its simplest form, when he says of 'Alice 
 Fell' and other kindred poems, ' Notwithstanding 
 the beauties which are to be found in each of them 
 where the poet interposes the music of his own 
 thoughts, they would have been more delightful to 
 me in prose, told and managed as by Mr. Words- 
 worth they would have been, in a moral essay or 
 pedestrian tour.' These last words were penned 
 doubtless in the vivid recollection of many pedestrian 
 tours, in which the two poets were accompanied by 
 the beloved sister, who was almost equally dear to 
 them both j and who, in addition to her charms of 
 mind and heart, was 
 
 Fleet and strong; 
 
 And down the rocks could leap along, 
 Like rivulets in May.
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 153 
 
 No one can doubt that the exquisite poem from 
 which these lines are taken, and which the doctor- 
 lawyer-coroner-editor Pangloss, who does not re- 
 present Firisbmy, secured himself from wholesome 
 oblivion by ridiculing in the House of Commons, 
 is a portrait of Dorothy Wordsworth. The brother's 
 description may help us to feel what a pedestrian 
 tour with such a companion must have been. 
 
 And she hath smiles to earth unknown; 
 
 Smiles, that with motion of their own 
 
 Do spread, and sink, and rise ; 
 
 That come and go with endless play, 
 
 And ever as they pass away 
 
 Are hidden in her eyes. 
 
 Well, the Lyrical Ballads were published in 
 July 1798; and a superfluity of cash being thus 
 obtained, the trio started in September following for 
 Germany, but separated at Hamburg, Coleridge 
 proceeding in one direction by himself, and the 
 brother and sister taking up their residence at Goslar. 
 The only person of eminence whom the Wordsworths 
 seem to have been introduced to was Klopstock, 
 that 'very German Milton' who is recorded as 
 talking like an 'Erz-Philister'; the substance of the 
 conversation is published in that portion of the Bio- 
 graphia Liter aria called l Satyrane's Letters.' They 
 spent some months at Goslar, but from one cause or
 
 154 ESSAYS. 
 
 other, partly Wordsworth's dislike of smoke, partly 
 that the presence of his sister would, according to 
 the notions of the place, have bound him to enter- 
 tain company if he accepted invitations, which his 
 finances prevented him from doing from these or 
 other causes, they failed to see much of German 
 society, and spent their time in learning the language 
 by reading and casual conversation. Upon the 
 whole, we can point to no specific fruits of this resi- 
 dence abroad in Wordsworth's writings ; while, on the 
 other hand, Coleridge derived from it a knowledge of 
 German philosophy and literature which coloured the 
 whole of his after-life, and mainly, though not en- 
 tirely, in consequence of which he is looked on by 
 many as the angel who has come down and troubled 
 the waters of English speculative science, so that they 
 who bathe therein derive from them healing and 
 strength. But even while he was in Germany, 
 Wordsworth's heart was in England; and it was 
 to English scenes and home recollections that his 
 poems of this period refer; except one lamentably 
 heavy attempt at being funny. ( Nutting,' well 
 worthy of being considered a pendant to l Tintern 
 Abbey,' the two noble poems afterwards incorporated 
 with the Prelude, 'Wisdom and Spirit of the 
 Universe,' and l There was a boy, ye knew him well,
 
 WOEDSWORTH'S POEMS. 155 
 
 ye cliffs,' the stanzas to Lucy, ' She dwelt amid 
 the untrodden ways/ so tender and graceful, sad, 
 holy, and beautiful as a Madonna, those others, 
 1 Three years she grew in sun and shower,' the most 
 exquisite description ever written of an English 
 country girl, half child, half woman, with the wildness 
 and witchery of a sylphide, the grace of a duchess, 
 and the purity of an angel, the poet's Epitaph, 
 containing those lines, so often applied to himself, 
 
 He is retired as noon-tide dew, 
 Or fountain in a noon-day grove ; 
 And you must love him, ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love ; 
 
 these and others of his poems less popular, he com- 
 posed during that winter at Goslar, the severest, it 
 is said, of the whole century. But they might have 
 been composed just as well anywhere else; and 
 neither in the records of this winter, nor in the poems 
 themselves, nor in any after results, is the influence 
 of this Goslar residence apparent. It was as he left 
 Goslar, that 'he poured forth the impassioned strain 
 which forms the commencement of the Prelude.' 
 This was on the 10th February, 1799 ; and of the 
 fourteen books, six only had been written in 1805, 
 and the seventh begun in the spring of that year 
 opens thus :
 
 156 ZSSAYS. 
 
 Six changeful years have vanished, since I first 
 Poured out (saluted by that quickening breeze 
 Which met me issuing from the city's walls) 
 A glad preamble to this verse. 
 
 He writes to Cottle on his return, l "We have spent 
 our time pleasantly enough in Germany, but we are 
 right glad to find ourselves in England, for we have 
 learnt to know its value.' 
 
 Wordsworth had now reached his thirtieth year, 
 when his training may be presumed complete. His 
 tastes, his pursuits, and his character, were fully de- 
 termined, and the remainder of his life, extending 
 over a space of fifty years, was but the progressive 
 manifestation of the powers cultivated, and the prin- 
 ciples formed, during the stages of which we have 
 been hitherto speaking. In the latter part of 1799 
 he took up his residence with his sister, in a cottage 
 at Grasmere; and here, or at a house called Allan 
 Bank, and subsequently at Rydal Mount, he passed 
 his long, peaceful, and happy existence in a round 
 of domestic charities and poetic activity. 
 
 The following extracts from Miss Wordsworth's 
 journal we quote, as the best account we can give 
 of the daily life of the writer and her brother : 
 
 Wednesday, April 28. Copied the Prioress' Tale. W. in the 
 orchard tired. I happened to say that when a child I would not 
 have pulled a strawberry blossom : left him, and wrote out the
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 157 
 
 Manciples tale. At dinner he came in with the poem on children 
 gathering flowers.* 
 
 April 30. We went into the orchard after breakfast, and sat 
 there. The lake calm, sky cloudy. W. began poem on the Celandine. 
 
 May 1. Sowed flower seeds : W. helped me. We sat in the 
 orchard . W. wrote the Celadine. Planned an arbour : the sun too 
 hot for us. 
 
 May 7- W. wrote the Leech- Gatherer. 
 
 May 21. W. wrote two sonnets on Buonaparte, after I had read 
 Milton's Sonnets to him. 
 
 May 29. W. wrote his Poem on going to M. H. I wrote it out. 
 
 June 8. W. wrote the poem ' The sun has long been set.' 
 
 June 17- W. added to the Ode^ he is writing. 
 
 June 19. Read Churchill's Rosciad. 
 
 July 9. W. and I set forth to Keswick on our road to Gallow 
 Hill (to the Hutchinsons, near Malton, York). On Monday, llth, 
 went to Eusemere (the Clarksons). 13th, walked to Emont Bridge, 
 thence by Greta Bridge. The sun shone cheerfully, and a glorious 
 ride we had over the moors ; every building bathed in golden 
 light : we saw round us miles beyond miles, Darlington spire, &c. 
 Thence to Thirsk ; on foot to the Hamilton Hills Rivaux. I went 
 down to look at the ruins: thrushes singing, cattle feeding among 
 the ruins of the Abbey ; green hillocks about the ruins ; these 
 hillocks scattered over with grovelets of wild roses, and covered 
 with wild flowers. I could have stayed in this solemn quiet spot 
 till evening without a thought of moving, but W. was waiting for 
 
 me. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 July 30. Left London between five and six o'clock of the 
 morning outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The city, 
 St. Paul's, with the river a multitude of little boats, made a 
 beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge ;J the houses not 
 
 * The Poem entitled 'Foresight,' vol. i. p. 149. 
 
 f ' On Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Child- 
 hood,' vol. v. p. 148. 
 
 J The Sonnet on Westminster Bridge was then written on the roof 
 of the Dover coach (vol. ii. p. 296).
 
 158 ESSAYS. 
 
 overhung by their clouds of smoke, and -were spread out endlessly ; 
 yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a pure light, that there 
 was something like the purity of one of Nature's own grand spec- 
 tacles. . . .Arrived at Calais at four in the morning of July 31st. 
 
 Delightful walks in the evenings : seeing far off in the west the 
 coast of England, like a cloud, crested with Dover Castle, the 
 evening star, and the glory of the sky : the reflections in the 
 water were more beautiful than the sky itself ; purple waves brighter 
 than precious stones for ever melting away upon the sands. 
 * * * * * * 
 
 On Monday, Oct. 4, 1802, "W. was married at Brompton Church, 
 
 to Mary Hutchinson We arrived at Grasmere at six in the 
 
 evening on Oct. 6, 1802. 
 
 Mary Hutchinson was Wordsworth's cousin, and 
 they had been intimate from childhood, having been 
 at the same dame's school together, whenever the 
 poet, during his earliest years, was on a visit to his 
 maternal relations at Penrith. How calm and beau- 
 tiful their wedded life was; how full of mutual sup- 
 port and happiness ; how rich in thoughtful affection, 
 esteem, and purifying influence, may be traced in the 
 poems with which Mrs. Wordsworth's name will ever 
 be more directly associated, forming a series to which 
 the sameness of subject, and the progressive develop- 
 ment of feeling, give a unity which shapes them into 
 an organic whole, one sweet and holy poem of wedded 
 love, reflecting the vicissitudes of earthly life, as the 
 mountain-circled lake reflects the changing face of an 
 April sky, bright or overcast, as clouds or sunshine 
 prevail above ; but whether in brightness or in gloom,
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 159 
 
 calm in its still depths, however the breeze may ruffle 
 and perplex the mirror of its surface. 
 
 We are indebted to Mr. de Quincey for portraits 
 of Wordsworth and his wife, which, in the absence 
 of anything of the sort in Dr. Christopher Words- 
 worth's volumes, we will take the liberty to present 
 in an abridged form j though whatever Mr. de 
 Quincey writes is so admirable, that no abridgment 
 can fail to do it injustice. He describes Mrs. Words- 
 worth, a few years after her marriage, as a tall 
 young woman, with the most winning expression of 
 benignity upon her features that he had ever beheld, 
 and with such a frank air, and native goodness of 
 manner, as at once to put a stranger at his ease with 
 her. Her figure was good, though rather slender; 
 her complexion fair, and blooming with an animated 
 expression of health. Her eyes, as her husband 
 paints her, 
 
 Like stars of twilight fair; 
 Like twilight!, too, her dusky hair; 
 But all things else about her drawn 
 From May-time and the cheerful dawn. 
 
 Mr. de Quincey adds to this portrait that, in these 
 eyes of vesper gentleness, there was more than that 
 slight obliquity of vision which is often supposed 
 to be an attractive foible of the countenance; and
 
 160 USSAYS. 
 
 yet, though it ought to have been displeasing or 
 repulsive, in fact it was not. 'Indeed, all faults, 
 had they been ten times more and greater, would 
 have been swallowed up, or neutralized, by that 
 supreme expression of her features, to the intense 
 unity of which every lineament in the fixed parts, 
 and every undulation in the moving parts, or play of 
 her countenance, concurred viz., a sunny benignity, 
 a radiant gracefulness, such as in this world I never 
 saw equalled or approached.' He tells us that, 
 f though generally pronounced very plain, she ex- 
 ercised all the practical power and fascination of 
 beauty, through the mere compensating charms of 
 sweetness all but angelic; of simplicity the most 
 entire; womanly self-respect, and purity of heart 
 speaking through all her looks, acts, and movements.' 
 She talked so little, that Clarkson used to say of her, 
 that she could only say, 'God bless you!' 
 
 A masterly portrait is completed by a description 
 of the intellectual character as not being of an active 
 order ; though, l in a quiescent, reposing, medita- 
 tive way, she appeared always to have a genial 
 enjoyment from her own thoughts.' The acknow- 
 ledged pique which colours all Mr. de Quincey's 
 picture of the Wordsworths may have had something 
 to do with this last touch. Our readers will scarcely
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 161 
 
 be disposed to agree with any depreciation of that 
 woman's intellect who wrote the two most beau- 
 tiful and thoughtful lines in one of Wordsworth's 
 most charming minor poems. It is to Mrs. Words- 
 worth that the poem called 'Daffodils' owes the 
 lines 
 
 They flash upon that inward eye, 
 Which is the bliss of solitude. 
 
 Such was the woman who for nearly fifty years 
 shared the home and heart of the poet with the 
 beloved sister. And what was he like himself? 
 Let us take a crayon sketch from the full-length 
 carefully coloured portrait, by the same skilful hand. 
 He was five feet ten inches in height, and of 
 moderate stoutness, but his legs were bad, and his 
 bust worse, from a narrowness of chest, and a droop 
 about the shoulders. These defects of figure were 
 more conspicuous when he was in motion, and were 
 increased by a habit he had of walking with his 
 arm in his unbuttoned waistcoat, which caused him 
 to advance with a twisting motion, so that he would 
 gradually edge off any one he was with, from the 
 middle to the side of the road, and the country 
 people used to say he walked 'like a cade,' some 
 sort of insect with an oblique motion. He had 
 originally a fine sombre complexion, like that of 
 
 M
 
 162 ESSAYS. 
 
 a Venetian senator, or a Spanish monk ; but constant 
 exposure to weather soon spoilt his tint, and gave 
 a coarse texture to his face, and grizzled hair came 
 early to displace the original brown. His counte- 
 nance, however, made amends for figure and com- 
 plexion ; ' it was,' says the artist we are copying, 
 'the noblest for intellectual effects that I have ever 
 been led to notice.' It had the character of a portrait 
 of Titian, or Vandyke, of the great age of Elizabeth 
 and the Stuarts. Haydon has painted Wordsworth 
 as a disciple, in his picture of l Christ's Entry into 
 Jerusalem.' The head was well filled out ; the 
 forehead not very lofty, but remarkable for its 
 breadth and expansive development. The eyes 
 were rather small, and never lustrous or piercing, 
 but at times, especially after long walks, l assumed 
 an appearance the most solemn and spiritual that 
 it is possible for the human eye to wear.' The 
 light that resided in them, though never superficial, 
 seemed at times ' to come from depths below all 
 depths,' ' the light that never was on land or sea.' 
 The nose was a little arched and large. But the most 
 marked feature in the whole face was the mouth ; 
 the swell and protrusion of the parts above and 
 around it were not only noticeable in themselves, but 
 gave the face a striking resemblance to the portrait
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 163 
 
 of Milton, engraved in Kichardson the painter's 
 notes on Paradise Lost, which was the only one 
 acknowledged by Milton's last surviving daughter 
 to be a strong likeness of her father. Every 
 member of Wordsworth's family was as much im- 
 pressed as Mr. de Quincey with the striking re- 
 semblance. The points of difference were, that 
 Milton's face was shorter and broader, and his eyes 
 larger. The only portrait of Wordsworth which 
 Mr. de Quincey thinks is to be at all compared for 
 likeness with this Richardson-portrait of Milton, is 
 that by Carruthers, with one of the Eydal water- 
 falls for a background. The objection to the later 
 portraits is, that Wordsworth, from the fervour of 
 his temperament, and the self-consuming energy 
 of his brain, prematurely displayed the appearance 
 of age. 
 
 We make no apology for the length to which these 
 descriptions have run ; rather, we heartily recommend 
 our readers to study the originals, not less for 
 Wordsworth's sake, than as admirable specimens of 
 one of the greatest prose writers whom our century 
 has produced. They will be found in Taifs Maga- 
 zine, among the ' Lake Reminiscences,' by the English 
 Opium-Eater. 
 
 In the year 1800, an edition of the Lyrical 
 M2
 
 164 ESSAYS. 
 
 Ballads, with an additional volume, and the famous 
 Preface, had been published. Fresh editions were 
 called for in the years 1802 and 1805, proof sufficient 
 that the fit audience was already gathering strength, 
 and that the reviewers were not the public. Still 
 the returns scarcely did more than pay the expence 
 of publication. This, however, was now of less im- 
 portance. In 1802, on the death of the first Lord 
 Lonsdale, his successor had paid the debt due to 
 Wordsworth's family with interest, and the sum that 
 fell to each member was about 1800. Mr. de 
 Quincey, with something of good-humoured banter, 
 and a half-serious latent reference to his own different 
 fate, speaks of Wordsworth, in reference to pecuniary 
 matters, as the most fortunate man in existence ; and 
 tells us that a regular succession of god-sends fell 
 ill to sustain his expenditure with the growing claims 
 upon his purse. We have mentioned the legacy 
 from Raisley Calvert, which saved him from news- 
 paper writing, and (though his nephew seems to 
 know nothing about it) from the equally unsuitable 
 employment of taking pupils. Next came Lord 
 Lonsdale's repayment, which enabled him to marry ; 
 for with his simple habits, what would have been 
 poverty to most men of education, was a competence 
 for him. Miss Hutchinson brought him some fortune,
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 165 
 
 which was afterwards increased by a legacy from an 
 uncle, expressed in thousands of pounds. In 1813, 
 just as his family were becoming expensive, he was 
 made stamp-distributor for Westmoreland, with an 
 income of above 500. per annum not to mention 
 the subsequent addition to this source of income 
 from the increase of his district, which Mr. de Quincey 
 estimates at 400. more; and finally (since Mr. de 
 Quincey wrote), on resigning this office in 1842, it 
 was bestowed upon his younger son, and he was him- 
 self put down upon the civil list for 300. a-year, and, 
 to crown all, made Poet Laureate ; * so that, by a 
 singular felicity, this man, unpossessed of any market- 
 able talent, was enabled, from the age of three-and- 
 twenty, to devote himself, without care or anxiety 
 for the future, to the cultivation of his genius, and 
 was secured in that free enjoyment of nature and 
 domestic happiness, which was an essential condition 
 of his poetic activity. To Raisley Calvert, who 
 laid the first stone, and to Lord Lonsdale, who first, 
 
 * Dr. Wordsworth is not quite correct in leading his readers to 
 suppose that his uncle's laureateship was a complete sinecure. On 
 Prince Albert's installation as Chancellor of the University of Cam- 
 bridge, he wrote the words of the Ode, which was composed by the 
 popular and accomplished professor of music, Dr. Walmisley, and 
 performed in the Senate House.
 
 166 
 
 by a prompt and liberal act of justice, and after- 
 wards, by a kind and discerning act of patronage, 
 built upon this foundation the solid edifice of the 
 poet's prosperity, be all honour paid. The name 
 and virtues of both are embalmed for immortality 
 in those pages, which owe so much to the leisure 
 their liberality and discernment fortified; but England 
 owes them a debt of gratitude, which she will pay, 
 in proportion as her people feel 'what a glorious 
 gift God bestows on a nation when he gives them 
 a poet.'* It would be unfair to Sir George Beau- 
 mont not to associate his name with Wordsworth's 
 benefactors. Before he had seen Wordsworth, 
 solely from the impression made upon him by his 
 writings, he, in 1803, purchased a beautiful spot 
 at Applethwaite, near Keswick, and presented it 
 to the poet, in order that he and Coleridge, who 
 was then residing at Greta Hall, might be per- 
 manent neighbours. Coleridge's failure of health 
 compelled him to leave England, and the plan was 
 never carried out; but the friendship that sprang 
 from this beginning, ripened into a close intimacy 
 and a frequent interchange of letters and visits. 
 
 * Dedication of second edition of Guesses at Truth to W. 
 "Wordsworth.
 
 WOELSWOETH' S POEMS. 167 
 
 Some of the happiest efforts of the titled painter 
 are illustrations of the poems of his friend; and 
 in many of those poems their names will go down 
 to posterity, linked together "by the purest ties of 
 friendship and mutual admiration. Sir George died 
 in 1827, and bequeathed to Mr. Wordsworth an 
 annuity of 100. to defray the expenses of an annual 
 tour. There had been a period in Wordsworth's 
 life, when fear of poverty and distress had clouded 
 his prospects. Mr. de Quincey informs us, on Miss 
 Wordsworth's authority, that her brother at one 
 time became subject to a nervous affection to such 
 an extent, that his friends, as a means of beguiling 
 his distress, played cards with him every night. 
 
 Again we say, honour and gratitude to Kaisley 
 Calvert and Lord Lonsdale, and the few men who, 
 like Sir George Beaumont, cheered and supported 
 the poet in his struggle with hostile criticism and 
 public apathy. To these three men his works 
 and his correspondence bear ample testimony. We 
 cannot, however, in justice, avoid a passing allusion 
 to the absence of any acknowledgment, or of even 
 any feeling of thankfulness, for sympathy of a less 
 substantial but no less necessary kind, from those few 
 men of letters who early discerned and expressed 
 their sense of Wordsworth's profoundly original
 
 168 USSAYS. 
 
 genius. If the poet's own extreme dislike of writing 
 prevented such acknowledgments in the shape in 
 which they form so pleasing a portion of the bio- 
 graphies of other poets, at least we should like to 
 have had some record of spoken feelings, which would 
 have shown that the homage of such men as Wilson 
 and De Quincey, and later in his career, of Thomas 
 Arnold, of Julius Hare, and of Henry Taylor, was 
 not paid to an idol of stone. The biographer's want 
 of sympathy with any form of goodness or talent 
 which does not run submissively within the channels 
 of Church-of-England orthodoxy according to the 
 Westminster Canon, may partly account for this. 
 Still something of it must, we fear, be attributed to 
 a hardness in Wordsworth's nature towards the 
 human world outside his own family circle, to an 
 independence of the sympathy of men, which was 
 indeed a means of preserving him from much dis- 
 comfort and annoyance, assailed and ridiculed as he 
 was, but which, at the same time, was grievously 
 discouraging to such worshippers as felt the worth 
 of their worship, and required some return of affection, 
 sympathy, and esteem. With men of letters es- 
 pecially, the 'limitation of his literary sensibilities' 
 prevented him from forming, or at least sustaining, 
 a mutual friendship. Even to Coleridge, who so
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 169 
 
 dearly loved him, who so generously and so ably 
 vindicated his claims to be called a great poet, whose 
 profound and elaborate criticism in the Biographia 
 Literaria remains to this day the most satisfactory 
 defence and the best exposition of his friend's poetry, 
 how small the return of affectionate, admiring appre- 
 ciation how dim and faint the sympathy during all 
 that period of Coleridge's life, when clouds and 
 darkness beset his path, and he was walking through 
 the valley of the shadow of death ! The fact is, he 
 did not value all this sympathy, because he did not 
 need it. He could never have written to Coleridge 
 as Coleridge wrote to him in Germany 
 
 "William, my head and my heart! dear "William and dear Dorothea! 
 You have all in each other ; but I am lonely, and want you ! 
 
 This last line, too, gives a more amiable reason 
 for Wordsworth's indifference to his friends and 
 admirers. His heart was wrapped up in his wife 7 
 and sister, and afterwards in his children, especially \ 
 in her who recalled his sister's childhood his beloved 
 Dora. The name recalls us from our discursion to^' J 
 
 speak of one in whom so much of the poet's deepest^-vu*^ 
 fondest affection was centered, and to whom his 
 biographer has paid the honour of joining her 
 portrait with her father's as the frontispieces to
 
 170 ESSAYS. 
 
 his two volumes. Wordsworth had in all five 
 children : 
 
 John, born 18th June, 1803. 
 
 Dorothy, called and generally known as Dora, 
 born 16th August, 1804. 
 
 Thomas, born 16 June, 1806. 
 
 Catharine, born 6th Sept. 1808. 
 
 William, born 12th May, 1810. 
 
 Of these, Thomas and Catharine died in early 
 childhood; John and William survive their father; 
 the former is a clergyman, the latter succeeded upon 
 his father's resignation to the distributorship of 
 stamps. Nothing remarkable is recorded of any of 
 the four by Dr. Christopher Wordsworth; but to 
 those for whom curious psychological facts have 
 interest, the name of Catharine Wordsworth (who 
 died before she was four years old; 'loving she is, 
 and tractable, though wild,' is addressed to her) will 
 always be memorable as the cause and object of 
 that strange nympholepsy, the agonies of which Mr. 
 de Quincey has so graphically and powerfully de- 
 scribed in those Lake Reminiscences , to which the 
 absence of what is interesting or characteristic in the 
 volumes we are reviewing has led us so often to refer. 
 Dora Wordsworth will always form a conspicuous 
 object in any artistically conceived biography of her
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POKVS. 171 
 
 father. When she was a month old, he addressed 
 to her that thoughtful poem, beginning, 
 
 Hast thou, then, survived, 
 Mild offspring of infirm humanity ? 
 
 Not many weeks after, she inspired that most 
 exquisite of all her father's sportive compositions, 
 'The Kitten and the Falling Leaves.' To her is 
 addressed l The Longest Day ;' and when, threatened 
 with blindness, he anticipates the time that he should 
 need a guiding hand, it is to his ' own Dora, his 
 beloved child,' that he would, like another CEdipus, 
 entrust his dark steps. And who can forget that 
 later group, in which the noblest art, warmed by 
 pure affection, has blended together in indissoluble 
 beauty, Dora Wordsworth, Edith Southey, and Sara 
 Coleridge? She married at a mature age Edward 
 Quillinan, Esq.,* to whose children, left to her 
 charge by a beloved friend, she had performed the 
 duties of a mother. But her health rapidly failed, and 
 after an unavailing journey to Portugal, of which 
 she has left a published record that proves her to 
 have inherited no little of the genius of her father 
 
 * We regret to be compelled to add that, since this article waa 
 written, the newspapers have announced the death of this gentleman, 
 himself the author of works which prove him to have been worthy of 
 his charming and gifted wife.
 
 172 ESSAYS. 
 
 and her aunt, she died of consumption in July 1847, 
 about three years before her father. From the 
 poems addressed to her, and those previously alluded 
 to, referring to Mrs. Wordsworth, with the scattered 
 allusions throughout his works to his sister, the 
 reader may have insight into Wordsworth's life, so 
 far as women influenced either his happiness or the 
 development of his genius. His ' Lucy' poems, 
 which seem to allude to some early love prematurely 
 removed, either belong to the region of pure ima- 
 gination, or all records of the fact have been ob- 
 literated. But the sister, the wife, and the daughter 
 remain for us as prominent portraits, scarcely ideal- 
 ized by the poet's pencil, as fellow-workers co-oper- 
 ating in the production of the poems, and above all, 
 as personal powers, sustaining, nourishing, purifying, 
 and invigorating the poetic temperament by the 
 sweet and holy influences of affection, and the quiet, 
 unobtrusive action of the domestic charities. The 
 history of literature furnishes no group upon which 
 the heart can rest more delighted and satisfied. 
 
 We have noticed Wordsworth's successive pub- 
 lications up to 1805. In 1807 appeared two volumes 
 of Miscellaneous Poems, which drew down upon 
 him the wrath and ridicule of Mr. Jeffrey. The 
 great oracle of the North had before this given
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 173 
 
 vent to sundry manifestations of indignant contempt, 
 but our poet had hitherto stood the brunt of the 
 critic's charge, in company with Southey, Lamb, 
 and the rest of the so-called Lakers. But now 
 on his single head was discharged the pitiless pelting 
 of the storm ; and while the majority of the world 
 were shaking with laughter, and a few trembling 
 with indignation, the unhappy victim himself main- 
 tained an unbroken serenity, and held on his way 
 with cheerful heart and hope unabated. God has 
 given to some men love, humility, and genuine ap- 
 preciation of the beautiful and the good in nature 
 and in art ; to others, the gift of saying witty things 
 and being ill-natured. What could such a critic, 
 with all his brilliant faculties, permanently effect 
 against a man who writes with the views and ex- 
 pectations expressed in the following passage from 
 a letter, dated 1807, to Lady Beaumont: 
 
 At present let me confine myself to my object, which is to make 
 you, my dear friend, as easy-hearted as myself with respect to these 
 poems. Trouble not yourself upon their present reception ; of what 
 moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny ? to 
 console the afflicted ; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the 
 happy happier ; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to 
 see, to think, and feel, and, therefore, to become more actively 
 and securely virtuous ; this is their office, which I trust they will 
 faithfully perform, long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are 
 mouldered in our graves.
 
 174 HSSJ.TS. 
 
 Still, the critic did something: he supplied wit- 
 lings with epigrammatic bon-bons, caused the poems 
 to be an unremunerative article of commerce, and 
 retarded the nation in their general acknowledgment 
 of a great poet; and they now stand side by side, 
 critic and poet, and the age has already approximated 
 to a just appreciation of each. Again, on the pub- 
 lication of the 'Excursion,' in 1814, the same hand 
 shot another and a more sulphurous bolt; he even 
 boasted, in his self-complacent blindness, that he had 
 crushed the ' Excursion.' He crush the ' Excursion'!' 
 cried Southey ; l tell him he might as well hope to 
 crush Skiddaw!' But this time, whether from mere 
 opposition, or from a gleam of genuine insight, the 
 Quarterly Review established, a few years pre- 
 viously, as a counterblast to the great Whig Bellows 
 issued a mild whiff of qualified approval. This, 
 however, was going too far; and next year, in a 
 notice of the l White Doe of Bylstone,' ' Wordsworth 
 stood at the bar of the Tory journal, arraigned and 
 convicted of poetical heterodoxy and literary felo-de- 
 se.' Nor in spite of Southey's intimate connexion 
 with the Quarterly, and his invaluable assistance to 
 it was the verdict reversed till, in 1834, the author 
 of Philip Van Artevelde contributed to its pages the 
 ablest estimate and the fullest acknowledgment of
 
 WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 1 75 
 
 Wordsworth's genius and poetry that has appeared 
 since the publication of the Biographia Literaria. 
 That still remains, and is likely, we fear, long to 
 remain, unapproached and unapproachable, as a 
 specimen of philosophical criticism, and a generous 
 testimony of personal admiration. 
 
 Instructive as are these facts, as warnings against 
 putting faith in critics, and against that self-conceit 
 and laziness which presume to judge a writer who 
 gives ample proof of original genius, without an 
 attempt to submit to his influence, or to seize his 
 point of view, and so feel with his feelings and see 
 with his eyes, we should not think them worth 
 mentioning here, but for the serene equanimity with 
 which Wordsworth endured, not only the lash of his 
 critics, but, what is far more galling, the neglect of 
 the world of letters. 'Let the age,' he writes to 
 Southey, l continue to love its own darkness ; I shall 
 continue to write with, I trust, the light of Heaven 
 upon me.' With more epigrammatic point than is 
 usual with him, he says of one of his principal 
 assailants, c he has taken a perpetual retainer from 
 his own incapacity to plead against my claims to 
 public approbation.' So again, in writing to Bernard 
 Barton : i It pleases, though it does not surprise me, 
 to learn that, having been affected early in life by
 
 176 ESSAYS. 
 
 my verses, you have returned again to your old loves, 
 after some little infidelities, which you were shamed 
 into by commerce with the scribbling and chattering 
 part of the world. I have heard of many who, upon 
 their first acquaintance with my poetry, have had 
 much to get over before they could thoroughly relish 
 it; but never of one who, having once learned to 
 enjoy it, had ceased to value it, or survived his 
 admiration. This is as good an external assurance 
 as I can desire, that my inspiration is from a pure 
 source, and that my principles of composition are 
 trustworthy.' 
 
 It was this rooted conviction of the genuineness 
 of his inspiration and the truth of his principles, 
 combined with a deep sense that the question involved 
 was not a merely personal one to himself, but con- 
 cerned the best interests of humanity, that sustained 
 his patience and cheerfulness. But subordinate to 
 this moral cause, we have no doubt that his active 
 habits and out-of-door life materially aided this effect. 
 1 Nine-tenths of my verses,' he says, 'have been 
 murmured in the open air.' ' There,' said his servant 
 to some strangers, who were being shown over 
 Eydal Mount, 'is my master's library, where he 
 keeps his books, but his study is out of doors.' 
 And on his return after a long absence from home,
 
 WOEDSWOETE'S POEMS. 177 
 
 his cottage neighbours have been heard to say, 
 ' Well, there he is ; we are glad to hear him booing 
 about again.' His pedestrian tours have been already 
 mentioned ; and, indeed, his tours seem to have been 
 most of them mainly pedestrian ; it is not from 
 carriage windows that such impressions as form the 
 stuff of his numerous poetic memorials of his journeys 
 to Scotland and elsewhere are received. How much 
 his happiness was subserved by this habit, may be 
 judged from an anecdote, showing the extreme 
 irritability of his constitution, which was further 
 manifested in frequently recurring attacks of inflam- 
 mation of the eyes. He received a wound in his foot 
 while walking about composing the 'White Doe,' 
 and though he desisted from walking, he found the 
 irritation of the wounded part was kept up by the act 
 of composition. Upon taking a mental holiday, a 
 rapid cure was the consequence. He adds, 'Poetic 
 excitement, when accompanied by protracted labour 
 in composition, has throughout my life brought on 
 more or less bodily derangement. Nevertheless, I 
 am, at the close of my seventy-third year, in what 
 may be called excellent health. But I ought to 
 add, that my intellectual labour has been generally 
 carried on out of doors.' Not that his poems were 
 given to the public as extempore effusions ; no writer 
 
 N
 
 178 ESSAYS. 
 
 of his time was more impressed with the necessity 
 of labour for the perfect poet. He thus writes to 
 a friend who seemed destined to tread the path of 
 science with honour and usefulness, and was in 
 danger of weakening himself by indulgence in the 
 composition of verses. 
 
 Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is 
 infinitely more of an art than men are prepared to helieve; and 
 ahsolute success in it depends upon innumerahle minutiae, which 
 it grieves me you should stoop to acquire a knowledge of. Milton 
 talks of ' pouring easy his unpremeditated verse.' It would he harsh, 
 untrue, and odious, to say there is anything like cant in this ; 
 hut it is not trw to the letter, and tends to mislead. I could point 
 out to you five hundred passages in Milton upon which labour has 
 heen bestowed, and twice five hundred more to which additional 
 labour would have been serviceable. 
 
 Mr. de Quincey calculated many years ago, that 
 Wordsworth's legs must have carried him then 
 nearly 200,000 miles; and an old friend of ours 
 is fond of telling that as he was riding one summer 
 afternoon on a coach along Grasmere, the coach 
 met Mr. Wordsworth and stopped; and a young 
 lady inside who was going on a visit to the poet, 
 put her head out to speak to him. ' How d'ye do ?' 
 said he, l how d'ye do ? Mrs. Wordsworth will be 
 delighted to see you. I shall be back in the evening. 
 I'm only going to tea with Southey.' Southey lived 
 not less than fifteen miles off hardly a yard of
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 179 
 
 level ground all the way. Another anecdote we 
 must tell, partly illustrating this peripatetic tendency, 
 and partly as giving a glimpse of that practical 
 humour, which Wordsworth was not deficient in, 
 though these volumes furnish but this solitary one 
 and that is owing to Mr. Justice Coleridge. 
 
 As we walked, I -was admiring the never-ceasing sound of water, 
 so remarkable in this country. "I was walking," he said, "on the 
 
 mountains, with the Eastern traveller ; it was after rain, and 
 
 the torrents were full. I said, ' I hope you like your companions 
 these bounding, joyous, foaming streams.' ' No,' said the traveller, 
 pompously, ' I think they are not be compared in delightful effect 
 with the silent solitude of the Arabian Desert.' My mountain blood 
 was up. I quickly observed that he had boots and a stout great-coat 
 on, and said, 'I am sorry you don't like this ; perhaps I can show you 
 what will please you more.' I strode away, and led him from crag 
 to crag, hill to vale, and vale to hill, for about six hours ; till I 
 thought I should have had to bring him home, he was so tired." 
 
 This prodigious habit of walking, and that other 
 of lying in luxurious dreamy meditation on sunny 
 bank, or under the shade of trees, account for the 
 very scanty records of study or even desultory reading 
 which these volumes afford. Wordsworth was fairly, 
 though by no means deeply or curiously read in 
 English poetry; Mr. de Quincey adds, in ancient 
 history ; but of this there appears no proof in these O 
 
 volumes, nor the faintest indication in his writings. Y 1 ^ 
 The only foreign literature for which he seems to 
 have had any taste was Italian, though he could
 
 180 JSSSATS. 
 
 speak French fluently, and had a fair knowledge of 
 German : of the Greek poets he talks, but with the 
 Latin poets he had that familiar acquaintance which 
 was so much more common with our fathers and 
 grandfathers than among ourselves ; he even translated 
 into rhymed heroic verse several books of the ^Eneid. 
 With philosophical writers and philosophical systems 
 he shows no acquaintance, and of physical science 
 he had no special knowledge. In fact, his range of 
 reading was extremely limited, and neither his letters 
 nor his recorded conversations would lead us to 
 suppose that within this range his knowledge was 
 profound or his observation keen. We cannot cull 
 from these two volumes a single critical remark that 
 betrays extraordinary sagacity or profound com- 
 prehension of an aesthetic law. He had or fancied 
 that he had, a taste for old books. { The only 
 modern books that I read,' he writes to Archdeacon 
 Wrangham, 'are those of travels, or such as relate 
 to matters of fact and the only modern books that 
 I care for; but as to old ones, I am like yourself- 
 scarcely anything comes amiss to me.' We question 
 whether this taste for old books was much more than 
 a liking for the thoughtful poets of the Stuart period, 
 such as Daniel and Herbert; stimulated perhaps by 
 very genuine indifference towards, if not contempt
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 181 
 
 for, all contemporaiy literature. Even the great 
 luminaries of our literature only beamed on him from 
 one side of their sphered brightness. Chaucer's 
 descriptions, sparkling with the dews of morning, and 
 his gentle piety of heart; the long-drawn sweetness 
 of Spenser's verse, and the elevated purity of his 
 moral; Milton's austere grandeur of thought and 
 stately pomp of imagination all these were Words- 
 worth's own, and he listened to them with rapt 
 attention as to the voice of his own soul. But of 
 a greater than any or all of these, we can only recal 
 one trace : 
 
 The gentle Lady married to the Moor. 
 
 And here it is not the agony of passion, nor the 
 subtle working of the insidious poison, nor the 
 diabolic revelation of concentrated coiled malignity, 
 that he dwells on, as characteristic excellences of the 
 play, but the gentleness of the victim attracts and 
 fascinates him. In all that mighty symphony of 
 maidenly admiration, of manly love, of stately age, 
 of vigorous youth, of calm domestic peace, of 'the 
 pride, pomp, circumstance of glorious war,' of bound- 
 less faith, of agonizing jealousy, of wrath, hate, fond- 
 ness, and despair, all blending into one complex 
 devouring passion, he hears but the simple melody
 
 182 ESSAYS. 
 
 of the flute. In that woof of death shot over with 
 all the glorious and changing hues of life, he sees 
 but one simple flower blooming by a grass-green 
 grave. That marvellous and many-sided life-picture 
 is to him only 'patience sitting on a monument, 
 smiling at grief.' Let us not be misunderstood ; 
 of course Wordsworth was acquainted with Shak- 
 speare's works; and of course, with all the world, 
 he placed him with Homer, at the head of the first 
 class of poets, while he knew that Spenser and 
 Milton only belonged to the second. But it is the 
 of course that marks the point at which his ap- 
 preciation stopped. There come from his lips 
 none of those penetrating flashes of light which 
 broke from Coleridge amid lustrous clouds and 
 radiant darkness, whenever he spoke of the great 
 masters of the Epos and the Drama, communicating 
 to others his own illuminating insight, the result 
 at once of profound study and profound affection. 
 In fact, we doubt whether Wordsworth read to en- 
 large the range of his conception or sympathies. 
 In the language of modern criticism, he kept his 
 own centre, and thence surveyed men and books; 
 never attempted to gain their centre. De Quincey 
 admirably points out how little needful books were 
 to a man who drew such an ' enormity of pleasure '
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 183 
 
 from the everlasting variety of nature's common ap- 
 pearances, who could derive 
 
 Even from the meanest flower that blows 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, 
 
 who felt that 
 
 One impulse from the vernal wood 
 
 Could teach him more of man, 
 Of moral evil, and of good, 
 
 Than all the sages can. 
 
 One story, thoroughly characteristic of Words- 
 worth's indifference to every production of modern 
 growth but his own poetry, we recently heard from 
 a friend. Possibly it may be in print, but we have 
 not seen it. When Rob Roy was published, some 
 of Mr. Wordsworth's friends made a pic-nic, and the 
 amusement of the day was to be the new novel. He 
 accompanied them to the selected spot, joined them 
 at luncheon, and then said ' Now, before you begin, 
 I will read you a poem of my own on Rob Roy. It 
 will increase your pleasure in the new book.' Of 
 course, every one was delighted, and he recited the 
 well-known verses ; and the moment he had finished, 
 said, l Well, now I hope you will enjoy your book ;' 
 and walked quietly off, and was seen no more all the 
 afternoon. 
 
 The very rough mode in which he handled books
 
 184 ASSAYS. 
 
 showed how little he cared for them. Southey said, 
 to let him into a fine library was like turning a 
 bear into a tulip garden ; and De Quincey tells of his 
 cutting open a ' pracht-edition' of Burke with a knife 
 he had just used to butter toast. What a contrast 
 his pious remorse at the ravage of the nut-bough 
 
 I felt a sense of pain when I beheld 
 The silent trees, and the intruding sky ; 
 
 and the earnest reverence of the exhortation that 
 follows : 
 
 Then, dearest maiden! move along these shades 
 In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand 
 Touch for there is a spirit in the woods. 
 
 We have left ourselves no space to speak of the 
 poet's later political opinions. It is well known 
 that they were of what is called a high Tory com- 
 plexion especially that he looked with no favourable 
 eye on the sort of education that has been latterly 
 spreading among the poor ; that he extremely disliked 
 dissent, and disapproved of modern concession to it ; 
 that he anticipated the most disastrous consequences 
 from the Catholic Emancipation and Reform Bills. 
 He passed, in fact, apparently from one pole to the 
 other of the political sphere, just as his friends 
 Southey and Coleridge did, and under the influence 
 of like causes, the chief of which was undoubtedly
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 185 
 
 the strong national feeling that was roused in them 
 all by Napoleon's strides of conquest, and the danger 
 that at one time seemed to threaten England. The 
 violence and crimes of the Jacobins had before this 
 alienated their sympathies from the French Re- 
 volution. They, men of thought and feeling, not 
 men of experience and action, had dreamt of a rose- 
 water revolution, and sickened at blood. At first, 
 they merely stood aloof, displeased equally at the 
 proceedings of the French and at our declaration of 
 war. But when danger came near 'the inviolate 
 island of the brave and free,' they not only felt as 
 Englishmen and as patriots, but looked upon their 
 country as the last citadel and stronghold of liberty ; 
 and henceforth war to the knife with France was 
 identical with devotion to freedom and virtue. 
 During the whole war with Napoleon, the Whigs 
 did what they dared to thwart its continuance, and 
 to annoy those who carried it on, and so became to 
 a degree identified with the enemies of the country. 
 This is the feeling that lay originally at the bottom 
 of Wordsworth's dislike of them. Then, again, he 
 never was at heart a democrat. Like Milton, he 
 would have had an aristocracy of intellect and virtue. 
 There is not a trace of the feeling, that numbers 
 should outweigh worth from beginning to end of his
 
 186 ESSAYS. 
 
 writings. He had, besides, a strong distaste for city 
 life, for its endless bustle, and its dull routine, ani- 
 mated as he thought by vanity and the desire of 
 wealth. Commerce, trade, and manufactures were 
 not, in his estimation, the sources of a nation's 
 greatness; but on country life, its occupations, its 
 traditions, and its customs he looked with a fond 
 affection, especially on that national church which so 
 associates itself to the senses, the imagination, and 
 the understanding with a country life. The village 
 spire and the squire's mansion are the centres of this 
 life, and Wordsworth's passion for nature could 
 scarcely have failed to throw something of a poetic 
 lustre, in addition to the value his reason and his 
 heart attached to them, over the institutions of which 
 both were symbols. His early association with 
 Coleridge, too, tended to open to him the deep 
 foundations on which our national institutions rest, 
 and to inspire him with a reverence for them, and 
 a cautious fear of weakening them by attempts at 
 improvement. If, however, any person is inclined to 
 call him reactionist and bigot, we would only remark 
 that there are three classes of politicians, those who 
 under the pressure of an existing evil seek for change, 
 without the faculty of discerning to what that change 
 will inevitably lead ; ignorant, in fact, of the law of
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 187 
 
 development which links together political events 
 and gives unity to History ; those who, with con- 
 scious and definite aim, plant the great hereafter 
 in the now, and are not consequently liable to be 
 startled and terrified, and driven into reaction by the 
 results of their own actions ; and thirdly, those who 
 with clear eye discern the dependence of the hereafter 
 upon the now, and because they shrink from the 
 hereafter, refuse to take the step which renders it 
 inevitably certain. To the last class belonged 
 William Wordsworth. 
 
 Fr user's Magazine, 
 
 July and August, 1851.
 
 188 
 
 POETEY AND CRITICISM. 
 
 DR. JOHNSON, in more than a century and a half 
 of English literary history, beginning with Cowley 
 and ending with Gray, found less than threescore 
 writers in verse whom he deemed worthy of a place 
 in his biographical collection. Though, in his own 
 line, and in cases where partiality did not disturb 
 his judgment, a tolerably correct arbiter of literary 
 reputation, the Doctor would find hard work to 
 persuade any well-read person of the present day, 
 that more than half the verse-writers whose lives 
 he has composed have any claim to be called poets, 
 or even men of distinguished talents. Perhaps the 
 account might be balanced by the addition to his 
 list of as many names as a modern judgment of the 
 literary celebrities of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries would erase from it. We have learned 
 to look for other qualities in those we honour
 
 POETRY AND CSIT1CISM. 189 
 
 with the name of poets than such as pleased the 
 critics of Johnson's age; or, at least, we have 
 learned a different relative estimate of poetical gifts, 
 and are used to flatter ourselves that ours is a- truer 
 and deeper view than the one held by our grand- 
 mothers. The result is that reputations have since 
 that time both sunk and risen, forgotten writers 
 have been dug up from the dust of oblivion, and 
 others who lived then per ora virum, in the gossip 
 of Mrs. Thrale's tea-table, and in the pages of the 
 oracular Doctor, are buried out of sight aud hearing, 
 and silence covers them. But taking all such 
 changes of opinion into account, the century and 
 a-half over which Johnson's immortal work extends 
 for immortal it must be called, though, in re- 
 verence be it spoken, it is a collection of lives which 
 is lamentably wanting in many qualities of first- 
 rate biography can on no mode of forming the 
 list be made to include a hundred writers in verse 
 who attained even moderate excellence. This gives 
 one for every year and a-half at a rough calculation. 
 Of these, our ten fingers amply suffice for the calcu- 
 lation required to number those whose present re- 
 putation could be an object of ambition to a 
 reasonable man ; and how poorly the denial of lasting 
 fame was compensated to the rest by any Esau's
 
 190 USSAYS. 
 
 chance of discounting immortality for pottage, 'the 
 Grub-street tradition,' which belongs to a consider- 
 able portion of this period, and the details known of 
 so many of the lives, leave no doubt. 
 
 This familiar fact of our literary history may 
 serve, with change of time and place, for a certainly 
 not exaggerated statement of what is true of any 
 equal range of years in the literary history of the 
 world. And it would seem to prove that, however 
 common a certain degree of poetical faculty may be 
 among men and that it is common, the almost 
 universal liking for poetry indicates the possession 
 of this faculty in such perfection and strength as 
 to enable the possessor to produce genuine poems 
 is exceedingly rare. Why this is so, and whether 
 the defect be one of nature or of training, an original 
 vigour denied, or a due cultivation neglected, is 
 a most interesting question ; but one which would 
 require us to diverge from our immediate route into 
 psychology and the science of education. We merely 
 point to the fact that poetical genius, capable of artis- 
 tically manifesting itself, is, as a matter of experience, 
 extremely rare. Yet, at this moment, we have ranged 
 before us in l glittering row,' a set of volumes in verse 
 by not fewer than half as many authors as Johnson 
 found poets in one hundred and fifty years, and these
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM. 191 
 
 form but a fraction of those published in England 
 within the last year. Not one of these volumes was 
 published without a belief on the writer's part that he 
 was an exception to the general rule of poetical inca- 
 pacity. For, draw as we may upon our candour, we 
 cannot suppose that any but a lunatic at large would 
 go to considerable expense to give the world testimony 
 that he or she was that most despised of drudges 
 a verse-writer without poetical genius. Still less 
 can we suppose that in many of these cases any but 
 the writer has been at the charge of publication. 
 Sint Mcecenates, non deerunt Marones, has long 
 ceased to be the limiting condition with authors. 
 The general diffusion of books and wealth produces 
 a capacity for writing verses in numerous persons 
 rich enough to be each his own Maecenas. And 
 so we are obliged to conclude that, in a single 
 year, there are among us as many persons of com- 
 fortable means living under a conviction that they 
 are poets, as there have been writers worthy really 
 of the name, even in the most liberal interpretation 
 of its meaning, since Chaucer five hundred years 
 ago first set our English life to English music. 
 And this goes on every year, so that, by a moderate 
 computation, there cannot be in England at this 
 moment less than a thousand persons, men, women,
 
 192 ESSAYS. 
 
 and adolescents, eating, drinking, sleeping, walking 
 about, and in some cases probably talking rationally 
 and entrusted with important duties, wlio have com- 
 mitted overt acts based upon a supposition so extra- 
 vagant, so contrary to all deductions of experience, so 
 certainly and entirely fanciful in nine hundred and 
 ninety of the thousand cases as fully, so far as the ex- 
 ample extends, to jiistify the cynical observation, that 
 ' half the world is mad, and the other half does not know 
 it.' Indeed, were we disposed to treat as anything 
 more than one of those amusing delusions incident 
 to the various forms of monomania, the assertion so 
 frequently met with in the preface to published 
 volumes of verse, that the publication has been urged 
 upon the author by admiring friends, we must 
 assume for every monomaniacal verse-publisher a 
 circle of friends afflicted with a still more unac- 
 countable form of monomania, if somewhat more 
 amiable in its symptoms. For the frenzy of the 
 verse-writer may be partially assigned to vanity and 
 the pleasure of composition; that of the admiring 
 friends would be pure Bedlamite distraction. But 
 in fact the friends have ever this singularity, that 
 they rejoice in the name of Harris, and neither post- 
 office, police, nor tax-collector, knows of their local 
 habitation.
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM. 193 
 
 Perhaps we may be suspected of having gone 
 to that expense in educating ourselves for the func- 
 tions of the critic, which Swift asserts to Tbe in- 
 dispensable for the true performance of the character, 
 in opposition to those defamers who could make 
 out ' that a true critic is a sort of mechanic set up 
 with a stock and tools for his trade, at as little 
 expense as a tailor.' Swift denies this position, and 
 says, ' On the contrary, nothing is more certain 
 than that it requires greater layings out to be free 
 of the critic's company, than that of any other you 
 can name. For, as to be a true beggar, it will 
 cost the richest candidate every groat he is worth; 
 so, before one can commence a true critic, it will 
 cost a man all the good qualities of his mind.' We 
 may be suspected, we say, of having got rid of 
 all good-nature, faculty of being pleased, &c., and 
 of laying our indigestion to the charge of wholesome 
 nutriment. The poetry may be good, but we may 
 have no stomach for it. When we have ceased to 
 admire, enjoy, and thrive upon the various banquets 
 which true poets have set before us, rich with the 
 spoils of time, and like the widow's cruse, undi- 
 minished by consumption, where appetite but grows 
 by what it feeds on, and fulness is not satiety, 
 nor repetition weariness when we no longer catch 

 
 194 ESSAYS. 
 
 in the poets' strains fragments of that eternal sym- 
 phony of which they are at once memorial and 
 prophecy; when heart, intellect, and sense cease to 
 find in those strains, broken and imperfect as they 
 are at best, hints of that perfect and harmonious 
 fulness of satisfaction which is the longing desire 
 and anticipated fruition of all faithful souls then 
 we may accept our own deadness of heart and blind- 
 ness of sight, as a probable reason why we look 
 upon the several hundreds of gentlemen and ladies, 
 now living in the land, and convicted of having 
 published volumes of verse, much with the same 
 feelings as a man born deaf must contemplate the 
 whirling mazes of the waltz. Nor can we accuse 
 ourselves of setting up a fanciful standard of poetic 
 excellence, and cultivating a morbid fastidiousness 
 which admits of no excellence that is not perfect. 
 We are too cognizant of the infinite variety of ima- 
 ginative power, of the admirable effects of this 
 variety, to indulge a narrow taste in poetry; and 
 too well aware of the difficulties that hamper its 
 exercise, and render perfect works of art, or even 
 perfect parts of works of art, the rarest accomplish- 
 ments of human skill, to be unhealthily fastidious. 
 But with the most catholic aspirations, with the 
 wish to be as large in sympathy, and as liberal
 
 POEMS AND CRITICISM. 195 
 
 of admiration, as is consistent with any high en- 
 joyment of true excellence, we must draw distinct- 
 ions between things different in kind; we cannot 
 call Euclid's Elements, on the one hand, poetry; 
 nor can we any more give that honoured title, and 
 the emotions that "belong to it, to compositions that 
 have nothing but rhyme and measure and those 
 seldom good to separate them from the ordinary 
 talk of vaguely-perceiving, coldly-feeling, and inar- 
 ticulately-speaking men and women. In the one 
 case, we call the geometry, perfect as it is, not 
 poetry, but science a body of abstract truths of 
 space; in the other, we call the producing state of 
 mind stupidity, dulness, weakness, or some other 
 constituent mark of the non-apprehensive ; and what 
 is produced we call stuff, nonsense, inarticulate 
 gibberish, or any other term which may seem ade- 
 quately to present some mark of the non-appre- 
 hended. 
 
 Let us see if, by following up the antithesis thus 
 suggested between poetry and science, we cannot 
 gain some tolerably clear notions on the essential 
 characteristics of poetry, both as mental process and 
 product on the nature of poetic insight and of 
 poems. As things in general, whether sensible 
 objects, actions, emotions, and thoughts, are the 
 02
 
 196 ESSAYS. 
 
 matter upon which the understanding operates in its 
 search after the body of truth, the knowledge of 
 which we call science; so the same objects furnish 
 to the imagination the subject-matter of that peculiar 
 mode of apprehension which we call poetic, and of 
 that peculiar form of language which we call poetry 
 in the mass, and poems in particular examples. The 
 difference is not in the objects, but in the faculty 
 which apprehends and operates upon the objects. 
 The understanding takes any object presented through 
 the consciousness, and proceeds to analyse it into 
 separate qualities, to name it and refer it to a class 
 of objects with which it possesses certain of its 
 qualities in common. Henceforward, when it asks 
 itself what the thing is, the understanding can answer 
 that it is this thing or that, giving some name 
 expressive of those common qualities which it has 
 along with all members of its class. The properties 
 which it has to distinguish it from another member 
 of its class are nothing to science, and the under- 
 standing pro hac vice takes no thought about them. 
 Of all science viewed in its statical aspect, apart from 
 the experience of change and the idea of cause, this 
 classification, naming, and definition are the ultimate 
 processes. And if we examine the higher branch 
 of dynamical science, what is it we seek to know
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM. 197 
 
 about the successive states of the object we in- 
 vestigate? Is it not again an analysis of the 
 concrete phenomena presented to us by experience 
 at successive times that we have to perform? We 
 want to find what is the phenomenon invariably 
 antecedent to some given phenomenon ; and we can 
 obtain the knowledge only by analysing a complex 
 coil of phenomena, and after many experiments, 
 much expenditure of hypothesis, we succeed in getting 
 at the invariable antecedent. We have then es- 
 tablished the sequence wanted, and all the attendant 
 phenomena are so much refuse. The process through- 
 out is analytical in its object, and may be described 
 as an endeavour to detect such identities among 
 objects coexisting in space, as will enable the mind 
 to classify, define, and name them, and such con- 
 nexion between objects successively existing in time, 
 as renders the separate currents of that mighty ocean 
 of intermingling, interacting vortices distinguishable, 
 methodical, intelligible. A scientific apprehension 
 of the universe would be a knowledge of all the 
 classes into which things can at any moment be 
 divided, and of the corresponding classes into which 
 their immediate antecedents would have been divi- 
 sible. Its lowest concept would be classes cleared 
 of individuals, its most concrete words names of
 
 198 ESS AYS. 
 
 species, its apotheosis would be when, having un- 
 ravelled the infinite web of creation, it could pass 
 from the outermost edge of its circumference along a 
 single thread to the centre and the source of all, and 
 its language would then have attained its highest 
 stage of generalisation, and would consist of two 
 words, cause and effect. 
 
 Imagination takes the same object that we sup- 
 posed before presented to the understanding. As 
 by chemical attraction it lays hold on precisely 
 that part of the phenomenon which the understanding 
 rejects, passing lightly over and taking little heed 
 of that which the understanding was in quest of. 
 What the object has in common with the class 
 to which its name and its definition refer it, the 
 imagination neglects as not characteristic, and seizes 
 eagerly on that which constitutes it an individual. 
 It may or may not happen that science has, in 
 the various systems of classification necessary for 
 its purposes, taken separately and at different times, 
 all the qualities of the object which strike the ima- 
 gination; but it never happens that it has taken 
 them simultaneously and all together. And we 
 are, therefore, fully justified in saying that ima- 
 gination neglects, comparatively, the single, separate 
 qualities of an object, on which the understanding
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM. 199 
 
 is at any one time engaged, and fixes on the complex 
 residue of qualities of which the understanding only 
 takes heed to throw them aside as nothing to the 
 purpose. Where the understanding is looking for 
 such qualities as will enable it to give the object 
 a name common to as many other objects as possible, 
 and therefore including as little content (as the 
 logicians call it) as possible, the imagination is look- 
 ing for those qualities which fill the senses, stir 
 the emotions, and form a concrete whole as crowded 
 with content as is consistent with unity. And if 
 a scientific concept of the universe be, as we have 
 said, a concept of classes tending upwards to unity 
 as cause ; a poetical view of the universe is an 
 exhaustive presentation of all phenomena, as indi- 
 vidual phenomenal wholes of ascending orders of 
 complexity, whose earliest stage is the organization 
 of single co-existing phenomena into concrete in- 
 dividuals, and its apotheosis the marvellous picture 
 of the avrjpiOfiov ^eKacr^a of the Infinite Life, no 
 longer conceived as the oceanic pulsation which the 
 understanding called cause and effect, but seen as 
 unutterable splendour, heard as awful rhythm of 
 far-sounding harmonies, and comprehended as the 
 Time and Space-vesture of Him who in his own 
 absolute being is incomprehensible.
 
 200 88 ATS. 
 
 If any of the writers who may feel aggrieved 
 by our remarks upon their works think fit to revenge 
 themselves by pronouncing this to be sheer nonsense, 
 we shall not take pains to turn the point of the 
 retort. We do not think it so, or we should not 
 allow it to stand; but any extremely abstract and 
 general statement which includes a very large and 
 multifarious class of mental processes and products 
 is sure to be distasteful and unintelligible to most 
 readers, so we shall not weary their patience with 
 what they will probably call metaphysical jargon. 
 But we venture to state as a practical conclusion 
 not dependent upon the preceding remarks, though 
 involved in them that whatever objects poetry- 
 deals with must be presented to the mind of the 
 poet as concretions of diverse phenomena organized 
 into phenomenal unity by the pervading vital in- 
 fluence of a subjective idea. And this gives us 
 the fundamental condition of poetic activity as well 
 as of the products of such activity, that such pre- 
 sentations must be made to the mind of the poet, 
 and by him given to the reader, as include and 
 contain at least all the qualities or properties of 
 an object necessary to constitute it a possible phe- 
 nomenal objective whole. If it be a flower of 
 which the poet wishes to raise the image, it must
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM. 201 
 
 be a particular flower, and have the form and colour 
 of some particular possible, though not necessarily 
 actual, flower. If his language fails to express these 
 two qualities at least, it fails by so much of being 
 poetic. If it be a human action, it must be pre- 
 sented at least with such characteristics as distinguish 
 one human action from another. If it be a natural 
 scene, the presentation must embrace such objects 
 made out with such detail, as are necessary to dis- 
 tinguish the scene for the purpose in hand from 
 another similar scene. But we need not pursue the 
 illustration. It is evident that poetry attains its 
 aim just in proportion as it creates individual and 
 not general presentations, just in proportion, that 
 is, as it is distinguished from and antithetical to 
 the representations of science. 
 
 Let not any one run away with the hasty notion 
 that this amounts to asserting that poetical pre- 
 sentation consists in enumeration of detail. The fact 
 is just the opposite. It consists in the presentation 
 of a whole, which arranges and subordinates all 
 detail. How much detail is requisite in each case 
 depends upon the nature of the whole contemplated ; 
 but in no case is detail enumerated introduced for 
 its own sake but organised. There must be parts, 
 but no simple additions of parts will make the whole ;
 
 202 ESSAYS. 
 
 on the contrary, they are not parts till the whole is 
 completed, or except in reference to the idea of the 
 whole. 
 
 Such, then, are the fundamental properties of 
 poetry, that, as the antithesis of science, it indi- 
 vidualises instead of classifying, presents organic 
 wholes instead of severed parts; things actual or 
 possible, instead of abstract general names. When- 
 ever the mind is thus engaged it is making poetry. 
 Language bears testimony to the multifarious and 
 incessant exercise of this power among men from the 
 earliest infancy of our race, and as M. Jourdain 
 talked prose all his life without knowing it, the 
 dullest proser among us would be astonished, and 
 perhaps disgusted, if he were conscious of the vast 
 amount and the high quality of the poetry he utters, 
 between getting up and going to bed, every day of 
 the year. But we live upon the past and inherit 
 other men's labours. We are not poets because we 
 are the heirs of the poets; and, as a senseless 
 spendthrift squanders untold wealth without any 
 sense of its value, or any adequate return of pleasure 
 or profit, we may squander all the poetry of our 
 current language without any thought of the pre- 
 ciousness of its material, and find in that which 
 might be ever giving us glimpses of the glory and
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM. 203 
 
 splendour of the universe, only the means of satis- 
 fying the wants of our logical or practical under- 
 standing. The language which bears the stamp of 
 imagination may by use and insensibility become to 
 us only a circulating medium of conventional signs, 
 and we may apply words and phrases alive with 
 presentative significance, without assigning to them 
 anything more than the representative or symbolical 
 relation to objects which the coinage of the under- 
 standing originally expresses. 
 
 Now, some one will say, a great deal has been 
 said about poetry, and not a word about verse ; and 
 a position has been taken up which assigns to the 
 poetical faculty or faculties an important part in the 
 formation of language, as if rhythm, verse, stanza, 
 rhyme, were no elements of poetry at all, but only 
 accidental graces. We believe them to be no 
 accidental graces, if accidental mean fortuitous ; but 
 accidental they certainly are in the logical sense of 
 the word, as not essential to the definition of poetry, 
 nor conditional of its production. They belong to 
 the poetry of man, because he is an emotional as well 
 as a perceptive being, and arise from the fact that 
 objects presented to the mind with living fulness 
 and power, are by the constitution of our nature 
 adapted to excite an emotion of pleasure, apart from
 
 204 ESSAYS. 
 
 our practical concern with them. Whatever the 
 presentation be in itself, whether the object presented 
 be such as we should like or dislike in its actual 
 manifestation to our senses, or in its effects upon our 
 actual interests, we delight in the satisfaction it gives 
 to our perceptive or speculative faculties. In minds 
 of peculiar sensibility this pleasure is heightened in 
 proportion to the keenness of these faculties, and the 
 attractions of the objects presented, till the emotion 
 excited seeks relief spontaneously by rhythmical 
 expression. We cannot now discuss the law by 
 which all emotion, that is not mere pain, is impelled 
 in its highest degrees to rhythmical expression, nor 
 are we prepared to make any assertion as to the 
 universality of this law, or its limitation to individuals 
 of peculiar organization. But we think no one will 
 deny that poetry, and music, and dancing, all rhyth- 
 mical art in fact, did begin, and must have begun, 
 as we have suggested. We believe that, like the 
 fundamental poetic faculty, whose function is to or- 
 ganize diverse phenomena into unities, so this at- 
 tendant faculty of singing from the emotions of 
 pleasure caused by the perceptive presentations so 
 made, must be in a degree common to all men 
 and women who can enjoy song. But we are not 
 prepared to maintain this as certain. This, however,
 
 POUTS Y AND CRITICISM. 205 
 
 we have no doubt about, that the rhythm of poems 
 expresses the emotion of the singer, just as the words 
 of song express the presentations of his imaginative 
 faculty; and that the various forms of metre, its 
 recurrent emphasis, its various pauses, its divisions 
 into stanza and verse, and its modern emphatic iden- 
 tities of terminating sound, are all originally expres- 
 sive of the varieties of kind and degree of emotion. 
 Upon this point all philosophy of metre, all criticism 
 of the form of poetry, is to be based. 
 
 True it is, as we said in reference to poetic lan- 
 guage, that use, and the indifference that comes of 
 use, may degrade forms which were originally the 
 spontaneous expression of plastic emotion into stereo- 
 typed moulds which any dullard, blind and crippled, 
 can fill with his clay. The very cause why genuine 
 poetry is, perhaps, a rarer accomplishment in ages 
 of high, or, at least, general culture, than in earlier 
 and ruder ages, is precisely the reason why we have 
 so many writers of smooth verse who cannot un- 
 derstand why critics will refuse them the title of 
 poets. Poetical language has become so common, 
 that while it is within anybody's capacity, the diffi- 
 culty becomes greater either to select words not 
 hackneyed that express poetical ideas so well as the 
 current words and phrases, or to make these phrases
 
 206 JESSATS. 
 
 do their original work of presenting real living ob- 
 jects, and not merely abstract names and conventional 
 signs. And the metrical forms have done duty so 
 often, and the ear has become so habituated to their 
 music, and at the same time so dull to their charms, 
 that it requires at once a higher inspiration than ever 
 to write verse from a spontaneous impulse, as dis- 
 tinguished from a mechanical knack, and finer art 
 than ever to cause the reader by means of verse to 
 share that rhythmical condition of emotion which 
 alone justifies to him what is, otherwise, a sense- 
 less artifice, and a simple hindrance to clearness of 
 thought and expression. 
 
 We have thus briefly sketched the outline of our 
 own theory of poetry in the general the theory on 
 which, in our opinion, sound criticism must be based 
 and on which, therefore, we profess to base our 
 own criticism. The principles we have enunciated 
 may be thus summed up. A poem must present 
 its subject as an organic whole, which, though made 
 up of parts common, it may be, to an infinite variety 
 of other wholes, is itself distinct from every other 
 whole, and is recognisable at once for what it is, an 
 individual not identical with any other individual of 
 the same general character. Any presentation of a 
 subject that falls short of this tends either towards
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM. 207 
 
 scientific abstraction or towards the utterly inarti- 
 culate, that which neither intellect nor imagination 
 have firmly grasped or clearly apprehended. This 
 is the principle we shall apply to the compositions 
 we are called to judge, in deciding on their ima- 
 ginative power. As to questions of form, we have 
 already stated that rhythm, metre, and all that 
 constitutes the mode of expression rather than the 
 substance though in art it is hazardous to draw 
 hard lines of distinction between form and sub- 
 stance, where form is not conventional are spon- 
 taneous natural signs of the singer's emotion, and, 
 as regards the reader, at once an index to the singer's 
 intensity of poetic temperature a kind of metronome 
 and the medium through which the same heat 
 of emotion is kindled in the reader, and he is infused 
 with the passion as well as the imaginative per- 
 ception of the subject. All, then, we have to ask 
 ourselves in reference to the form of any particular 
 poem is, whether it does so express the emotion of 
 the writer, and what quality and degree of emotion 
 it expresses that of a great soul raised to the height 
 of its subject, or of a little soul vainly striving to 
 warm its thin blood, but puny, starved, and shiver- 
 ing, even in presence of the central fires of the 
 universe. To any poem which will stand the test
 
 208 ESSAYS. 
 
 of the application of these principles the tribute of 
 our hearty admiration is due, and will be joyfully 
 paid. What will not stand this test is not poetry 
 at all ; and in masquerading under the poetical cos- 
 tume, it is tolerably sure to lose any worth or 
 attractiveness of sincere human speech, as the voice 
 we may delight to hear in its own natural tones of 
 conversation ceases to charm and becomes painfully 
 ridiculous in attempting the accomplishment of sing- 
 ing, for which nature has not adapted its organization. 
 
 Fraser's Magazine, 
 Feb. 1855.
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 209 
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 
 
 A PERSON of cynical temper is likely to note with 
 emphasis, and with the grim pleasure that testifies his 
 perception of a fact his humour can assimilate and 
 grow by, a peculiarity in the mode which poets 
 have almost uniformly adopted in their treatment of 
 love. These interpreters of life would by no means 
 support the cynic in his estimate of that passion; 
 they have, on the contrary, exhausted heaven and 
 earth for similitudes by which to express their sense 
 of the beauty and worth of women, of the woes of 
 slighted and the raptures of successful lovers, of the 
 agonies and ecstacies, the torments and the blisses, 
 which women are capable of exciting in the hearts 
 of men, and of the comparative poverty and worth- 
 lessness of all the delights of life weighed against 
 one hour of the transports of requited passion, or 
 the calm of satisfied affection. They may, moreover, 
 be credited with a degree of sincerity in this appre- 
 
 p
 
 210 ESSAYS. 
 
 elation, which it would be difficult to accord to their 
 tuneful raptures on many of the other emotional 
 elements of human life. Poets are unquestionably 
 born with fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters 
 occasionally, and by chance aunts and uncles; but 
 except the JEneid, King Lear, and Antigone, we 
 remember no great poem in which the natural af- 
 fections of kindred have been among the leading 
 motives. - Poets, too, have countries, with institutions 
 and beliefs, unless Schiller's theory be true, which 
 assigns them the clouds for dwelling-place and 
 domain; but those who have tuned their harps to 
 great national themes, to the foundation of empires, 
 the formation of civil society, the triumphs of liberty 
 and order, the origin of supernatural beliefs, and the 
 growth of religious worship, belong, so far as they 
 have been successful, to a remote past, and are the 
 study of scholars rather than the delight of the 
 people, while their modern imitators have made the 
 very name of epic -a bugbear to all moderately 
 sensible and candid minds. In fact, success in the 
 treatment of subjects disconnected with love has been 
 most exceptional; and even the greatest poets, who 
 have looked abroad upon human life, and have found 
 it poetical throughout its whole extent and under 
 every variety of circumstance, have felt the attraction
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 211 
 
 of love so irresistible, that they have shot its golden 
 threads to illumine the darkest and enliven the 
 dullest parts of their microcosmic web, and to bring 
 down upon the whole surface the sheen of heaven's 
 light ; while this universal passion has alone by itself 
 sufficed to make common men poets for the moment, 
 to raise minor poets to unwonted richness of thought 
 and imagery, and has brightened the faces of the 
 great masters of song. By its light, when poetry 
 and the world were young, blind Homer read the 
 tale of Troy ; and through a vista of three thousand 
 years, amid myriads of armed warriors, the eye still 
 follows Briseis as she leaves with reluctant feet and 
 reverting gaze the tent where captivity had found 
 a solace, and the stern master was softened into the 
 lover ; still above the din of battle, above the grave 
 turmoil of debate, we listen to the fierce Achilles 
 moaning for his lost mistress ; the charms of Helen 
 are more to us than the wisdom of Athene and 
 the counsels of Nestor; and the sympathies of all 
 but a few extremely right-minded people are through- 
 out with the Trojans, and would be with Paris, but 
 that he is a downright coward, and the world instinct- 
 ively adopts the maxim, . 
 
 None but the brave 
 Deserve the fair. 
 
 P2
 
 212 ESSAYS. 
 
 Society and poetry with it had degenerated be- 
 tween the birth of the epic full-grown and full-armed, 
 like its own Athene, from the head of Homer, and 
 the time when .^Eschylus slaughtered Persians at 
 Salamis, and exhibited their ghosts upon the stage 
 at Athens. The forte of the Athenian drama cer- 
 tainly does not lie in the representation of love. But 
 then it must be remembered that the Attic stage was 
 eminently the domain of stateliness and convention- 
 ality, that waxen masks frozen into one unchanging 
 no-expression, to which even Charles Kean can only 
 feebly approach, would have been an inadequate 
 instrument for rendering so eminently versatile and 
 variable a passion as love, even reflected in the 
 countenance of an ancient philosopher or a modern 
 mathematician. Besides, the construction of the 
 mouthpiece of these masks, to serve for a speaking- 
 trumpet, could only have illustrated one rather curious 
 scene, belonging more to comedy than tragedy a 
 gentleman proposing to a lady who is stone-deaf. 
 Fancy Romeo, major humano by ten inches of cork 
 sole, sweeping along the stage with a drawing-room 
 train of dowager dimensions, and bawling, ' I would 
 I were a glove upon that hand,' through the sort of 
 instrument with which the captain of the Bellerophon 
 speaks the Arrogant half a mile off. Or, still worse,
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 213 
 
 Juliet sighing through the same instrument, 'O, 
 Eomeo! O, gentle Romeo!' and all that wondrous 
 play of passion not once flushing up in the cheek or 
 kindling in the eye. But the ugliest old hag that 
 ever rode a broomstick would be less repellent of the 
 gentler emotions than an automaton Venus, made to 
 speak through a vox Jiumana organ pipe. In short, 
 without insisting upon the social circumstances of 
 Athenian women, and the peculiar notions that re- 
 gulated Athenian tragedy, these mere mechanical 
 conditions under which the tragedians wrote, are 
 sufficient to account for the insignificant part assigned 
 to love in their compositions, though their choruses 
 abound in passages of the highest lyrical beauty and 
 fervour, which indicate that the passion was still as 
 powerful as ever to sway the feelings and excite the 
 imagination. When the stage became again a mirror 
 of actual contemporaneous life without disguise, as in 
 the later comedy of Menander and his Latin imitator 
 Terence, we find that even the mechanical obstacles 
 before mentioned were not so insuperable but that 
 women play an important part in these dramas, 
 and love becomes a prominent motive and a principal 
 attraction. Pindar unfortunately gave himself up to 
 the turf, the prize-ring, and a curious kind of Pagan 
 high-church hagiology, much as if the editor of BeWs
 
 214 ESS4YS. 
 
 Life, the author of Boxiana, and the poet of the 
 Christian Year, were all three gentlemen in one. 
 The universal human vein shows itself, however, here 
 and there, with a strange gleam of tenderness, in 
 stray biographical allusions and moral reflections, 
 interspersed with the main subject in hand, which is 
 always to celebrate some Derby event of that old 
 time, or to trace up the lineage of Hellenic game- 
 chickens and White-headed Bobs to Hercules. In 
 Theocritus, again, love is 'the main haunt and 
 region' of the song, and that song about the sweetest 
 whose echo still sounds over the waters of Time from 
 the dim shore of ancient Hellas. Then if we come 
 somewhat nearer to our own times, and to poets who 
 have influenced modern literature at least, up to a 
 very recent period more than their greater Hellenic 
 brethren have done, the names of Ovid and Horace 
 suffice to carry on the succession. Horace certainly 
 wrote plenty of good moral sentiment and patriotism 
 of the sort possible under a despotism of the modern 
 French type ; but he will always be for us the little 
 fat man who loved and lived with various Lalages, 
 and made them, we feel perfectly assured, of more 
 account in his existence than the great 'nephew of 
 his uncle,' his prime minister Maecenas, or even, 
 we fear, than the Palatine Apollo himself, and that
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 215 
 
 Jupiter Optimus Maximus who half frightened the little 
 sceptic with summer thunder. Even the grandiloquent 
 Virgil cannot get through his epic without a strong 
 spice of love, and pious ./Eneas vindicates for himself 
 the English as well as the Latin force of the stereo- 
 typed epithet by behaving like a scoundrel to a 
 woman, and sneaking off without even saying good- 
 bye, or leaving a christening-cup for the possible 
 Tyrian lulus. That episode has saved the JEneid 
 from becoming a mere scholar's poem, in spite of its 
 magnificent versification. And when a greater than 
 Virgil took up his mantle, was it not by permission 
 of the allegorists, be it spoken by the woman whom 
 he loved that Dante was guided to the Heaven of 
 Heavens to the presence of the Ineffable? Nay, 
 was it not in reality under her guidance, 
 
 Donna beata e bella 
 Tal che di comandare io la richiesi, 
 
 as her messenger says of her, that the poet ventured 
 all through that mystic voyage? by her goodness, 
 sweetness, and beauty alone that his heart was sus- 
 tained amid the wrongs, the torments, the purgatorial 
 discipline of life ? by the light of love alone that life 
 became to him tolerable and intelligible? And in 
 spite of his stern theology, with its 
 
 Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate,
 
 216 ESSAYS. 
 
 is it not just amid hell's fiercest torments that love 
 the most passionate, the most sensuous love of man 
 and woman shows itself to him mightier than the 
 torment, outbraving despair, and stronger in its own 
 simple strength than Hell and Fate, and that terrible 
 foreknowledge of an eternity without hope? It is 
 needless to pursue a topic so familiar through the 
 great names of modern poetry. Only conceive this 
 passion of love blotted out from the pages of our own 
 first-class poets, from Chaucer, from Spenser, from 
 Shakspeare, from Milton what a sky without its sun 
 would remain ! what an earth without its verdure, its 
 streams, and its flowers ! Something, no doubt, there 
 would be still to attract us in the manner-painting, 
 the grand thoughts, the vivid natural descriptions ; 
 but even these would have lost a charm that now 
 often insensibly mingles with them and enhances 
 them. And the poor minors ! where would they be ? 
 All of them in the same category that Drayton's 
 PolyoTbion, Browne's Britannia s Pastorals, Dave- 
 nant's C^ond^bert, were in before Southey and Co. 
 fanned a small flame of antiquarian poetic enthu- 
 siasm, and are in again now that small flame has 
 gone out. Here and there some lyric, short and 
 tersely expressed, would survive in popular esteem, 
 especially if married to fine music; but the bulk
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE SOUSE. 217 
 
 would float in undistinguished heaps by Lethe's 
 wharf, and scientific cultivators of literature would 
 resort to them, as agriculturists do to the guano 
 stores, to fertilize dry brains, and astonish the world 
 with spasmodic crops of lectures on historical de- 
 velopment of poetry, and so forth. If we go on to 
 English poetry since the Eevolution, we find the 
 same, or even greater, predominance of this single 
 element of emotion. With the exception of a few 
 reflective and satirical poems that is, with the ex- 
 ception of versified sermons and essays borrowing 
 some of the ornaments of poetry proper where is the 
 really popular poem that does not depend for its main 
 charm on its pictures of love? What would even 
 Walter Scott himself be without it ? Cowper indeed 
 is a real exception, so far as his poetry does not 
 come under the head of reflective or satirical, as most 
 of it does ; but Cowper was no less exceptional as 
 a man than as a poet; he fell early in life into 
 hypochondria and confirmed valetudinarianism, and 
 was anything but a normal specimen of the warm- 
 blooded male mammal whose differentia is poetry- 
 writing. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, have 
 written the finest poetry of passion since the Eliza- 
 bethans ; Moore wrote little else than sentimental love 
 poetry; Campbell's Gertrude stands highest of his
 
 218 ESSAYS. 
 
 long poems ; and if Wordsworth thought to wield a 
 poet's influence while he regarded the poet's mightiest 
 spell as a Circean drug, has not the result been that 
 he is more respected than loved, almost universally 
 acknowledged to be a great teacher, but a heavy writer, 
 and that the poems and passages of his which are the 
 greatest favourites are precisely those, like Laodamia, 
 fiuth, She was a Phantom, &c., in which he has 
 mingled this spell, or composed his enchantment 
 entirely of it ? We will not say a word here of Mr. 
 Tennyson, for his name alone at once brings to the 
 mind some of the most delicious love poetry in the 
 English language, however much noble poetry of 
 another kind it may also recal. 
 
 The cynic, then, with whom we started, has cer- 
 tainly no great reason to pique himself upon the 
 support his opinions obtain from the poets, so far 
 as his and their estimate of love are brought into 
 direct comparison. But the fact that he would not 
 fail to notice as characteristic in the poetical estimate, 
 and supporting his own opinion rather than theirs 
 of the worth of women and of the influence of love 
 upon human happiness, is that, with a very few 
 exceptions, the poets expend their raptures upon 
 the period of courtship rather than of marriage, upon 
 the pursuit rather than the attainment, as if a woman
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 219 
 
 were like a fox, precious only for the excitement 
 of the chase, worthless when won. Or if they 
 venture at all beyond the wedding-day, it is too 
 often to treat marriage according to that terrible 
 mot of Sophie Arnauld as the sacrament of adultery. 
 A vast quantity of literature turning on this crime 
 is written indeed in the spirit of that typical young 
 Parisian who, seeing an injured husband on the stage 
 shoot his wife's seducer, was heard to mutter to 
 himself, cochon de mari ! And our cynical friend 
 might go over nearly the same range of poetry that 
 we have taken, and would show us that Briseis 
 was not the wife, but the mistress, of Achilles ; that 
 Helen's husband was not Paris, but Menelaus. He 
 would add that Odysseus only sighed for Penelope 
 while he was away from her, enduring moil and 
 toil in the trenches before Troy, and remembering 
 the substantial comforts of his island home, as well 
 as its sentimental attractions ; moreover, that as soon 
 as he returned he was tired of his wife, and finally 
 could not stand domestic felicity any longer, but 
 proceeded on a voyage with an extremely vague 
 destination, from which he took good care never to 
 return. The Greek tragedians, too, would furnish 
 our friend with ample materials for his humour. 
 Though there is little enough in their plays of that
 
 220 ESSAYS. 
 
 love which is the flower of life, making youth 
 glorious, manhood calm and strong, and age peaceful 
 and serene, there is enough and to spare of all 
 the foul and terrible results that belong to the cor- 
 ruption of this consummate excellence. We should 
 hear of Clytemnestra and Phaedra, of Deianira and 
 Medea; be told probably that the Furies were re- 
 presented as women ; that mythology, the mother 
 of poetry, began and continued in this key, having 
 little to say of faithful wives and constant lovers, 
 but delighting in vagrant loves, in ladies celestial 
 and semi-celestial, all acting with the largest liber- 
 ality. We fear, too, that the lovers in the Pastorals 
 of Theocritus had not been to the register's office; 
 and Queen Dido could no more have been received 
 at Queen Victoria's court than Queen Isabella the 
 Second. The loves of Ovid and Horace were little 
 better, it is to be feared, than that poor Violetta 
 at whom the great Times has been letting off such 
 tremendously overcharged artillery. Dante, too, un- 
 fortunately had a wife and children at home all 
 the time he was Baking that mystic journey under 
 the protection of the donna beata e bella; and Pe- 
 trarch's Laura, par excellence, the type of a poet's 
 mistress, was another man's wife. The ladies of 
 the present day would scarcely thank Chaucer for
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 221 
 
 his portraiture of Griselda; and the Wife of Bath, 
 which, it is said, Dr. Doddridge used to read aloud to 
 the young misses of his pious circle, cannot be con- 
 sidered on the whole complimentary to the fairer half 
 of mankind. The only thoroughly charming wife 
 whom Shakspeare represents, was married to a black 
 man, and throttled by him in the honeymoon or shortly 
 after. Spenser's idolatry was paid to a maiden 
 queen, on the very ground of her maidenhood. 
 Milton's Eve no less, the cynic would say, from 
 the poet's personal experience of married life than 
 from the historical necessity ruined her husband, 
 and brought upon the whole world sin, woe, and 
 death. Our 'Augustan' poets were not, as a class, 
 sentimental men. Swift, Pope, and Addison are 
 three persons as thoroughly desillusionnes as M. de 
 Rochefoucauld himself; and Matthew Prior turned 
 for such feminine consolations as he needed to the 
 Lalages of Drury Lane. Byron, Scott, Shelley, 
 Keats, all paint courtship, not marriage; if Burns 
 wrote John Anderson my Jo, John, and The Cotter's 
 Saturday Night, he wrote Amang the Eigs of Barley 
 with quite as much gusto, and modulated into that 
 key a great deal oftener than into any other. Mr. 
 Tennyson has indeed written the Miller's Daughter, 
 and the close of the Princess ; but we should be re-
 
 222 
 
 minded that the latter is merely a lover's anticipation, 
 his ideal picture of what married life should be, and 
 that the miller's daughter's husband is not a strikingly 
 interesting person, if he be not to be called decidedly 
 imbecile, in spite of the two charming songs of which 
 he claims the authorship. 
 
 The cynic has unquestionably a strong prima 
 facie case. It is a remarkable fact, that wedded 
 love has been almost uniformly rejected, as offering 
 no available material for high poetry, except in its 
 corruption, as a theme for tragedy; while, on the 
 other hand, satirical and comic writers have ex- 
 hausted ridicule and malignity in depicting the vices, 
 the absurdities, and the mean miseries, of people who 
 are ill-matched in marriage. As we believe that 
 the elements of high poetry exist wherever human 
 hearts beat with true vital heat ; and as we further- 
 more believe that the emotional and truly human 
 life of a man and woman, so far from being over 
 when, from lovers, they become husband and wife, 
 then only begins to attain its full growth and ca- 
 pacity of bearing fruit and flower of perennial beauty 
 and fragrance, we are tempted to inquire into some 
 of the causes of this onesidedness which we have 
 charged the poets with, and to indicate briefly some 
 of the real poetical capabilities of wedded love, and
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE SOUSE. 223 
 
 the sort of treatment they require in being wrought 
 into actual poems. 
 
 The first and most obvious temptation to limit 
 the poetical representation of love to the period before 
 marriage, lies in the fact that this period seems spon- 
 taneously to supply that beginning, middle, and end 
 which narrative or dramatic poems are truly enough 
 supposed to require. Courtship, in ordinary cases, 
 divides itself into two phases, the termination of each 
 of which is a point of definite interest, towards which 
 all the incidents, all the talk, all the surprises, 
 suspensions, difficulties, and triumphs, which make 
 up the plot of a love-story, are directly subordinated. 
 A man falls in love with a woman, and has to win 
 his way by degrees more or less rapid and eventful, 
 to her affection; this is the first phase, rich, as 
 experience proves, in elements of poetical pleasure, 
 which all men and women are capable of enjoying 
 without effort. Then follows the period, richer still 
 in all the materials for varied incident, in which 
 the social arrangements come in to interpose obstacles 
 between the lover and his mistress, and to keep the 
 interest of the reader or spectator always on the 
 stretch. The advantage is beyond all computation 
 which this natural framework, made ready to his 
 hand, confers upon the poet who seeks mainly to
 
 224 ESSAYS. 
 
 amuse his audience by a series of connected occur- 
 rences, in each of which the least cultivated, the least 
 thoughtful, the least generous, can take an interest 
 that demands no strain, scarcely any activity, of 
 the imagination, the heart, or the reason. And 
 the free, vigorous exercise of the imagination is 
 so rare among mankind, that it is little wonder 
 that poets have been content with making their ap- 
 peals to sympathies that are sure to have been familiar 
 to the hearts of their audience at some time or other 
 in the actual experience of life, and need but the 
 faintest outline of reality in the representation to 
 awaken them again. But though it must be allowed 
 that the love of husband and wife offers no such 
 obvious aud facile series of connected incidents, 
 with well-marked divisions, and all tending, by due 
 gradations of interest, to one event; and though in 
 proportion as the interest of poetry is made to turn 
 less on striking outward circumstances, a heavier 
 demand is made upon the imagination of both writer 
 and reader, and a mere passive reception of familiar 
 thoughts and feelings becomes no longer sufficient 
 for the enjoyment of the poem ; yet this only amounts 
 to saying that poetry has some higher function than 
 to amuse idle people, some nobler office in cultivating 
 the heart, and enlarging the range of the inner
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 225 
 
 life, than can be attributed to it so long as it merely 
 strikes one chord of feeling, or at best plays over and 
 over again, from the beginning of time to its close, 
 the same old tune in different keys and on different 
 instruments. It is, indeed, quite true that it would 
 be impossible to mark the commencement of any 
 poem, whicli should deal with ordinary wedded love 
 as its main subject, by an event as definite as the 
 first meeting of a man with his future mistress, or 
 a feeling as definite, as distinct from his previous 
 state of mind, as the first awakening of the passion 
 that is to rule his life henceforward through the story. 
 The same remark applies as forcibly to the want of 
 any event equally definite with marriage to serve for 
 a termination, unless all such poems were to have 
 a mournful close, and end with a deathbed, or fall 
 into the old tragic vein of seduction, adultery, and 
 murder. We must candidly consent to give up that 
 source of interest which lies in the changes produced 
 upon the outward relation, upon the union or sepa- 
 ration of outward existence between the two persons 
 whose inner relations, whose mutual influence upon 
 each other, and affection towards each other, are by 
 supposition the subject of the poem. Instead of 
 watching the formation of a double star, and having 
 all our interest concentrated upon the critical moment 
 
 Q
 
 226 ESSAYS. 
 
 when the attraction of one for the other finally draws 
 them within the inevitable vortex in which they are 
 henceforth eternally to revolve, we have to explore 
 the laws and witness the phenomena of their mutual 
 action, henceforward bound by a limit in the pre- 
 servation of which consists the whole peculiarity, the 
 whole interest, of this class of objects. Or, if we 
 may be allowed another illustration from physical 
 science, instead of having to deal with a problem 
 mainly dynamical, we advance into the higher because 
 more complex and mysterious region of chemistry, 
 and are dealing, not with the mutual action of distinct 
 bodies, but with the composition of bodies, with the 
 changes their constituent atoms undergo by com- 
 bination, and by the action of the subtle elements 
 heat, light, electricity, and so forth. Will any one deny 
 that the analogy is a true analogy? And if it be 
 so, is it not mere sloth and dulness, mere want of 
 subtle imagination, of delicate sensibility, that can 
 complain of want of incident, and consequent want 
 of interest, in the drama of wedded love? There 
 can be no want of incident so long as character in- 
 fluences fortune, and fortune character ; so long as the 
 destinies of human beings in this world are carved 
 out by their virtues and their vices ; so long as wisdom 
 and goodness sweeten the bitterest cup of adversity ;
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 227 
 
 so long as folly and wickedness infuse gall into the 
 bowl of nectar which fortune hands her favourites 
 in jewelled gold. It is the stupidity of poets which 
 can see no incident in married life so long as the 
 marriage vow is kept to the letter in the grossest 
 interpretation of that letter; and which has for the 
 most part induced them, when they have introduced 
 married people at all, to use marriage to give a 
 spicier piquancy to intrigue, or a darker glow to 
 hatred and revenge. 
 
 But this notion of want of incident unfitting 
 married love to be a subject for poetry is closely 
 connected with another notion still more false, vulgar, 
 and immoral. The romance of life is over, it is said, 
 with marriage; nothing like marriage, is the con- 
 genial reply, for destroying illusions and nonsense. 
 In which notable specimens of ' the wisdom of many 
 men expressed in the wit of one,' there are two remark- 
 able assertions involved. The first is that love is an 
 illusion; the second, that marriage destroys it. We 
 may concede to the wisdom of the market-place thus 
 much of truth, that the love which marriage destroys 
 is unquestionably an illusion. We may also concede 
 to it this further truth, that the love of husband 
 and wife is no more the love of the man and woman 
 in the days of their courtship, than the blossom of 
 Q2
 
 228 ESSAYS. 
 
 the peach is the peach, or the green shoots of corn 
 that peep above the snows of February are the 
 harvest that waves its broad billows of red and gold 
 in the autumn sun. If indeed there are persons so 
 silly as to dream, in their days of courtship, that life 
 can be an Arcadian paradise, where caution, self- 
 restraint, and self-denial are needless; where in- 
 exhaustible blisses fall like dew on human lilies that 
 have only to be lovely ; a world from the conception 
 of which pain and imperfection, sin, discipline, and 
 moral growth are excluded, marriage undoubtedly 
 does destroy this illusion, as life would destroy it 
 were marriage out of the question. If, too, attracted 
 originally to each other by some slight and inde- 
 finable charm, by some chord of sympathy vibrating 
 in harmony at a moment's accidental touch, often by 
 the mere force of the tendency at a particular age to 
 what the great Florentine calls 
 
 Amor che al cor gentil ratto s'apprende, 
 Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona, 
 
 two young persons fancy that this subtle charm, this 
 mysterious attraction, is endowed with eternal strength 
 to stand the shocks of time, the temptations of fresh 
 attractions, the more fatal because more continual sap 
 of unresting egotism, ever active to throw down the
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 229 
 
 outworks and undermine the citadel of love; and 
 trusting to it alone, think that wedded happiness can 
 be maintained without self-discipline, mutual esteem 
 and forbearance; without the charity which covers 
 the defects it silently studies to remove ; without the 
 wisdom and the mutual understanding of character 
 to which profound and patient love can alone attain 
 this is another illusion which marriage will destroy. 
 What is, however, generally meant by the sayings 
 we have quoted, is, that there is nothing like marriage 
 for taking the passion out of people, for taking out 
 of them all disinterested aspirations, all noble hopes 
 and fears, all delicacy of sentiment, all purity of 
 mind, all warmth of heart nothing like marriage 
 for making them see, in respectable money-making, 
 in respectable dinners, respectable furniture, carriages, 
 and so forth, the be-all and the end-all of human 
 existence. So far as marriage in our actual world 
 realizes these noble predications; and, so far as it 
 does, the result is mainly owing to the miserable 
 views of life and its purposes which society instils 
 into its youth of both sexes ; being still, as in Plato's 
 time, the sophist par excellence, of which all indi- 
 vidual talking and writing sophists are but feeble 
 copies just so far is married love, if the phrase is 
 to be so outrageously perverted, utterly unfit for any
 
 230 HSS4YS. 
 
 high poetry, except a great master of tragedy should 
 take in hand to render into language the too common 
 tragi-comedy of a human soul metamorphosing itself 
 into a muckworm. But surely every one can look 
 round among his acquaintance, and find marriages 
 that are not after this type, marriages which 
 
 "have wrought 
 
 Two spirits to one equal mind, 
 "With blessings beyond hope or thought, 
 With blessings which no words can find." 
 
 The romance of life gone ! when with the humblest 
 and most sordid cares of life are intimately associated 
 the calm delights, the settled bliss of home; when 
 upon duties, in themselves perhaps often wearisome 
 and uninteresting, hang the prosperity and the 
 happiness of wife and children ; when there is no 
 mean hope, because there is no hope in which regard 
 for others does not largely mingle no base fear, 
 because suffering and distress cannot affect self alone ; 
 when the selfishness which turns honest industry to 
 greed and noble ambition to egotistical lust of power 
 is exorcised; when life becomes a perpetual exercise 
 of duties which are delights, and delights which are 
 duties. Once romance meant chivalry ; and the hero 
 of romance was the man who did his knightly devoirs, 
 and was true and loyal to God and his lady-love.
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 231 
 
 If with us it has come to mean the sensual fancies 
 of nerveless boys, and the sickly reveries of girls 
 for whose higher faculties society can find no em- 
 ployment, it is only another instance in which the 
 present is not so much wiser and grander than the 
 past, as its flatterers are fond of imagining. To us 
 it appears that where the capacity for generous de- 
 votion, for manly courage, for steadfast faith and 
 love, exists, there exists the main element of romance; 
 and that where the circumstances of life are most 
 favourable for the development of these qualities in 
 action, they are romantic circumstances, whether the 
 person displaying them be, like Alton Locke, a tailor, 
 or, like King Arthur, a man of stalwart arm and 
 lordly presence. Nor do we see that the giants, 
 dragons, and other monsters of the old romance, are 
 in themselves one whit more interesting than the 
 obstacles that beset the true modern knight in his 
 struggles to perform manfully the duties of his life, 
 and to carry out the noble spirit of that vow which 
 he has solemnly taken at the altar, to love, comfort, 
 honour, and keep in sickness and in health, the 
 woman who has put her youth, her beauty, her 
 life, and happiness into his hands. 
 
 It may, however, be said that married life, when 
 it is not utterly corrupted into crime and wretched-
 
 232 ESSAYS. 
 
 ness; when, that is, it in any degree answers to its 
 ideal is necessarily monotonous; and that, though 
 to the husband and wife it may be a perpetual source 
 of discipline and delight, it offers no scope to the 
 poet, whose story must march, his characters develope, 
 and their passions and affections exhibit change, 
 gradation, and culmination. We have already ad- 
 mitted so much of this objection, as to concede to 
 the period before marriage greater facilities for marked 
 gradations of interest depending on changes in the 
 outward relations of the persons whose fortunes and 
 feelings are being narrated. We have said that 
 those outward relations once fixed by marriage, the 
 action of the poem which is to depict married love 
 must lie within narrow limits, and that its interest 
 must depend on more subtile delineation of shades of 
 character and feeling, on a perception, in a word, 
 of those effects which spring from the conduct of 
 the affections in married life, and those influences 
 which circumstance and character combine to work 
 in the affections, and which, slight and commonplace 
 as some persons may choose to think them, are 
 important enough to make human beings happy or 
 miserable, and varied enough to account for all the 
 differences that an observant eye can find in modern 
 family life. And the fact, which few persons will
 
 THE ANGEL IN TEE HOUSE. 233 
 
 dispute, that in our actual family life there is found, 
 quite irrespective of distinctions of class and differ- 
 ences of wealth, every possible gradation of happiness 
 and misery, of vulgarity and refinement, of folly and 
 wisdom, of genial sense and fantastic absurdity, is 
 a sufficient answer to those who talk of the monotony 
 of married life as an objection to its fitness for yield- 
 ing materials for poetry. In real truth, there is much 
 more monotony in courtship than in marriage. A sort 
 of spasmodic and, to spectators well acquainted with 
 the parties, a somewhat comical amiability is the 
 general mask under which the genuine features of 
 the character are hidden. Moreover, the ordinary 
 interests of life become throughout that period com- 
 paratively insipid ; and lovers are proverbially stupid 
 and tiresome to every one but themselves. No doubt 
 this has its compensating advantage for the poet, 
 who transforms his readers into the lovers for the 
 time being; but it certainly gives monotony to all 
 manifestations of the passion in this its spring-time, 
 which is not found in the same passion when the 
 character has recovered from the first shock, and life, 
 with all its interests, again enters into the heart, 
 but invested with new charms and higher respon- 
 sibilities, and with the deeper, fuller affections swell- 
 ing in a steady current through the pulses.
 
 234 ESSAYS. 
 
 So much for those more obvious objections that 
 may in great measure account for the almost uni- 
 versal rejection of married love as a theme for poetry. 
 We do not care to argue against any one who says, 
 much less any one who thinks, that it is only young 
 men and women who are interesting. Even with 
 respect to mere sensuous beauty, it is a great ab- 
 surdity to suppose that its splendour and charm are 
 confined to two or three years of early womanhood. 
 'Beaucoup de femmes de trente ans,' says a shrewd 
 French writer, after enumerating the supposed at- 
 tractions of youth in women, ' ont conserve" ces 
 avantages; beaucoup de femmes de dix-huit ans ne 
 les ont plus ou ne les ont jamais eu.' Certainly 
 no Englishmen who uses his eyes needs this 
 assurance; and no one who delights in the society 
 of women can doubt that they continue to grow in 
 all that charms the heart and intellect, in all the 
 materials of poetry, after they become wives and 
 mothers. 
 
 There is, however, one solid objection to the 
 tenour of our remarks to which we are inclined 
 to give great weight. We can fancy many persons, 
 for whose opinions we have the highest respect, 
 protesting against the intrusion of the poet into the 
 recesses of married life, against the analysis of feel-
 
 TEE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 235 
 
 ings that were not given us to amuse ourselves with, 
 against 
 
 " Those -who, setting wide the doors that bar 
 The secret bridal chambers of the heart, 
 Let in the day." 
 
 Literature was made for man, and not man for 
 literature. There are, unquestionably, scenes which 
 the imagination had better leave alone, thoughts 
 which should find no utterance in printed speech, 
 feelings, upon which the light and air cannot dwell 
 without tainting them. But without in the slightest 
 degree trenching upon ground that should be sacred 
 to silence, we conceive married life, as one of the 
 most powerful influences at work upon the character 
 and happiness of individuals and of nations, to present 
 capabilities of noble and beautiful poetiy, that, so 
 far from weakening the strength or vulgarizing the 
 delicacy of domestic affection, would exalt and refine 
 it. We see no reason for supposing that the conjugal 
 relation would suffer in purity or spontaneous power 
 by being passed through the alembic of a great poet's 
 imagination. If it became the subject of morbid 
 poetry or of weak maudlin poetry supposing such 
 a combination of terms allowable the same result 
 would follow as from the morbid or weak treatment 
 of any other powerful human emotion the poet
 
 236 ESSAYS. 
 
 would influence only weak and morbid people. Nor 
 do we see that the danger is really so great of getting 
 morbid, trashy, unhealthy poetry on this subject as 
 on the more familiar subject of love before marriage. 
 It would demand qualities of genius which in them- 
 selves are a strong guarantee the power and the 
 taste of delineating subtle shades of character and 
 feeling, a perception of the action of character upon 
 fortune, an insight into the working of practical life 
 upon the affections, and their reaction upon it. Such 
 topics are not to the taste, or within the capacity, of 
 melodramatic or sensualized minds; and whatever 
 good poetry was produced on the subject would, as 
 all good poetry does, abide and work upon the highest 
 class of minds, and go on ever spreading its whole- 
 some influence, and giving the tares less and less 
 room to grow. Our domestic life is not so uniformly 
 beautiful as that it may not be profited by having its 
 faults, its short-comings, its miseries brought into 
 the full light of consciousness, as only poets can 
 bring them; and bright pictures of what that life 
 might be, what it sometimes is in actual experience, 
 may surely do good as well as give pleasure. But 
 we are not so much concerned to vindicate a large 
 field of strictly ethical teaching for poetry as to open 
 to her almost untried and certainly unhacknied regions
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 237 
 
 of beauty, pathos, and varied human interest ; to bid 
 her cease to stop at the threshold, and boldly, fear- 
 lessly, and reverently penetrate into the inner shrine 
 of love cease to sing for ever of the spring-green 
 and the promise, and remember that love has its 
 flush of summer, and its glow of autumn, and its 
 winter's lonely desolation. Happily, we have not 
 to advocate a theory without being able to produce 
 recent cases of successful practice. Mr. Kingsley's 
 Saint's Tragedy, those poems by Mr. Tennyson of 
 which we have already spoken, and some of the most 
 beautiful of Mr. Browning's lyrical poems, as well as 
 his narrative poem of The Flight of the Duchess, and 
 such a character-piece as his Andrea del Sarto, will 
 indicate sufficiently how rich a field lies waiting for 
 observation and delineation in poetry of the highest 
 order. Some of the pieces introduced upon our stage, 
 within the last few years, principally of French origin 
 such as, for instance, Still Waters Hun Deep 
 in spite of the coarse tendency to make adultery 
 too constant a feature of the action, point to the 
 capabilities of the subject for lighter treatment. 
 
 One word before we close upon two special ad- 
 vantages to be anticipated from the habitual exten- 
 sion of poetical representation to married love. The 
 subject, in the first place, interests mature men and
 
 238 ESSAYS. 
 
 women, who must feel, at the perpetual iteration of 
 the first stage of passion in literature, much as if their 
 bodily diet were confined to syllabub and sweetmeats. 
 Poetry is comparatively little read by grown people 
 who do not pretend to cultivate literature as a special 
 study mainly, we apprehend, because it confines 
 itself to repeating, with a variety of circumstance, 
 experiences which they have passed through, and of 
 the partial and onesided truth of which they have long 
 ago been convinced by their more mature experience. 
 A poetry which interpreted to them their own lives, 
 which made them see in those lives elements of beauty 
 and greatness, of pathos and peril, would win their 
 attention, stimulate their interest, and refine their 
 feelings, just as much as the same effects are pro- 
 duced by ordinary love-poetry on the young. We 
 shall not argue the question whether the latter effect 
 has been upon the whole for good or not; such an 
 assumption lies at the root of all discussions upon 
 particular extensions of the poetic range. To us it 
 appears indisputable that, along with some perils, the 
 representation of any phase of human life by a man 
 of genuine poetic power is a step towards improving 
 that phase practically, as well as an enlargement of 
 the range of that life which forms so important a 
 part of a modern man's cultivation, the life he par- 
 takes by imaginative sympathy.
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 239 
 
 A second advantage which we should anticipate 
 from the proposed extension would be the creation 
 of a literature which would, in some important 
 respects, rival and outweigh any real attraction which 
 the properly styled 'literature of prostitution' may 
 have for any but mauvais sujets. It may shock 
 some good and innocent people to be told that such 
 literature is attractive to any but abandoned men 
 and women. A statistical account of the perusal 
 of the worst class of French novels by the educated 
 classes of this Christian and highly moral country 
 would probably be a startling revelation. One can 
 only say off-hand, that a familiar acquaintance with 
 this class of works is commonly displayed in society ; 
 and the reasons are not very recondite. These novels 
 depict a certain kind of real life without reserve ; 
 there is flesh and blood in them; and though some 
 of the attraction is due to the mere fact that they 
 trench on forbidden ground, some to the fact that 
 they stimulate tendencies strong enough in most men, 
 and some to their revelations of scenes invested with 
 the charm of a licence happily not familiar to the 
 actual experiences of the majority of their readers, 
 there can be little question that one strong attrac- 
 tion they possess is due to their being neither 
 simply sentimental nor simply ascetic. In accord-
 
 240 ESSAYS. 
 
 ance with an established maxim, which tells us 
 that, corruptio optimi pessima est, these books are 
 almost inconceivably worthless, even from an artistic 
 point of view, but the passions of these novels 
 are those of grown people, and not of babies or 
 cherubim. We can conceive a pure poetry which 
 should deal with the men and women of society in as 
 fearless and unabashed a spirit, and which should 
 beat this demon of the stews at his own magic, 
 should snatch the wand from the hand of Comus, and 
 reverse all his mightiest spells ; though, doubtless, 
 this task belongs more to prose fiction, as the objec- 
 tionable works are themselves prose fictions. In the 
 poems we have already mentioned, this has been 
 done. There is no reason why literature, or poetry 
 in particular, should be dedicated virginibus puer- 
 isque ; men and women want men's and women's 
 poetry; the affections and the passions make up the 
 poetical element of life, and no poetry will commend 
 itself to men and women so strongly as that which 
 deals with their own passions and affections. Again 
 we say, we are not careful to guard our language 
 against wilful misconstruction. 
 
 The volume published last year, with the title of 
 The Angel in the House, Part I., inspired us with the 
 hope that a poet of no ordinary promise was about to
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 241 
 
 lay down the leading lines of this great subject, in 
 a composition half narrative and half reflective, which 
 should at least show, as in a chart, what its rich 
 capabilities were, and give some indication of the 
 treasures that future workers in the same mine might 
 have gathered in, one by one. But two Parts have 
 been already published, and he has only got as 
 far as the threshold of his subject; while the age 
 is no longer able to bear poems of epic length, even 
 with, and much less without, epic action. He has 
 encumbered himself besides with the most awkward 
 plan that the brain of poet ever conceived. The 
 narrative is carried on by short cantos idyls he 
 calls them in which, however, the reflective element 
 largely prevails ; and between each of these are in- 
 troduced, first, a poem wholly reflective, and as long 
 as the corresponding narrative canto, upon some phase 
 of passion not very strictly connected with the narra- 
 tive, and then a set of independent aphorisms, which 
 are often striking in sentiment and sense, and fre- 
 quently expressed with admirable terseness and force, 
 but which convey the impression that the writer 
 is resolved not to lose any of his fine things, whether 
 he can find an appropriate place for them or not. 
 We doubt whether any excellence of execution would 
 have won great success for a poern written on such 
 E
 
 242 ESSAYS. 
 
 a plan, and threatening to extend to such a for- 
 midable length. But had the writer really set about 
 singing his professed theme, and not wasted his 
 strength and the patience of his readers in this two- 
 fold introduction, he possesses many of the qualities 
 requisite for success. His conception of feminine 
 character is that of a high-minded, pure-hearted, and 
 impassioned man, who worships and respects as well 
 as loves a woman. His delineation of the growth 
 of love in the woman's heart is delicate and subtile, 
 and the lofty aspirations and unselfish enthusiasm 
 he associates with the passion of his hero no less 
 true to the type he has chosen. And as we conceive 
 him not so much to intend to relate the story of 
 any individual man and woman, as to embody in 
 a narrative form a typical representation of what love 
 between man and woman should be, he cannot be 
 censured for selecting two persons of a nature higher- 
 toned and circumstances richer in happy influences 
 than fall to the lot of most of us in this world. Had 
 it been the purpose of our paper to review The Angel 
 in the House, we could have found many admirable 
 passages in which sentiments of sterling worth and 
 beauty are expressed with great force and felicity 
 of language. Perhaps the only very prominent fault 
 of execution lies in the writer's tendency to run into
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 243 
 
 logical puzzles by way of expounding the para- 
 doxical character of love, which, like wisdom, is yet 
 justified of her children. This tendency betrays him 
 not only into prosaic and even scholastic phraseo- 
 logy, that gives frequently a ludicrous turn to his 
 sentiments, but tempts him too often into the smart- 
 ness of epigram, varied by the obscurity of trans- 
 cendental metaphysics. To the same feature of 
 his mind, as shown in the fondness for this way 
 of expressing his subject, we are inclined to attribute 
 the jerkiness of the verse, which often reads like 
 a bit of Hudibras slightly altered, and is very disso- 
 nant from the innermost spirit of the poem. If 
 we might venture to offer a bit of advice by way 
 of conclusion, we should say to him, forget what 
 you have done ; treat these two parts as an experiment 
 that has partially failed ; begin at the real subject 
 married love on a different plan and in a different 
 key. Let the narrative, the drama, occupy a more 
 prominent position; reject every phrase, every turn 
 of thought, that appears to you to be particularly 
 smart and clever, and adopt a measure that cannot 
 run into jingle, but will flow with a calm delicious 
 melody through the pleasant lands along which its 
 course will lie. And if we add one exhortation 
 more, it will be to guard against over-refinement; 
 E2
 
 244 ESSAYS. 
 
 not to be afraid of the warm blood and beating 
 pulse of humanity ; to remember that the angel in 
 the house is, as the least sensuous of poets reminds 
 
 us 
 
 'An angel, but a woman too.' 
 
 Fraser's Magazine, 
 October, 1856.
 
 CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 245 
 
 CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STEELING. 
 
 THE domain of political economy is not unlimited; 
 the laws of supply and demand are not the only or 
 the strongest forces at work in nature. Here is a 
 man whom the world would have been well content 
 to leave quiet in his early grave by the sea-shore in 
 the sweetest of English islands; to leave him there 
 to the soft melodies of the warm wind and the gentle 
 rain, and the pious visits now and then of those who 
 knew and loved him when his eye was bright and 
 his voice eloquent with sparkling thoughts and warm 
 affections. He had done nothing that the public 
 cared for; had left no traces on the sands of Time 
 that the next tide would not have effaced. But he 
 lived amongst men who write books, amongst some 
 of the very best of such ; and two of the foremost of 
 them loved him so well that they could not let his 
 memory die, thought that the positive actual results
 
 246 ESSAYS. 
 
 of his life made known to the public were but faint 
 indications of the power that lay in him though sorely 
 foiled and "baffled, and that he in his individual 
 spiritual progress typified better than most the 
 struggle that the age is passing through, its processes 
 and its results. But the two men, though united in 
 affection for Sterling, were so different in other re- 
 spects, that the memorial raised by the one could 
 scarcely fail to be unsatisfactory to the other. Arch- 
 deacon Hare, the author of the earlier biography, is 
 a man of encyclopedic knowledge, a profound clas- 
 sical scholar, the most learned and philosophical of 
 modern English theologians, at once accurate and 
 wide in his acquaintance with European history and 
 literature. And this large survey of the forms under 
 which the men of the past have thought and acted 
 has not led in him to an indifference to all forms, 
 but rather to a keener sense of the organic vitality 
 of forms, especially of national institutions, whether 
 civil or ecclesiastical polities, states or churches. 
 Moreover, apart from this general characteristic, which 
 would lead to an intellectual and practical reverence 
 for the institutions of his own land, and a hesitating 
 caution in the introduction of constitutional changes, 
 Mr. Hare is an English churchman of no ordinary 
 cast. He has passed from the region of traditional
 
 CAELTLE'S LIFE OF STEELING. 247 
 
 belief, has skirted the bogs and quicksands of doubt 
 and disbelief, and has found firm footing where alone 
 it seems possible, in a revelation whose letter is 
 coloured by the human media through which it has 
 passed, and in a faith whose highest mysteries are 
 not only harmonious with but necessary complements 
 to the truths of reason. The English Church is to 
 him the purest embodiment of his religious idea, as 
 the English constitution was to him, in common with 
 Niebuhr, Coleridge and other great thinkers, of the 
 idea of a state. Such a man could not write a life 
 like Sterling's without feeling that his relation to 
 Christianity and the Church was the great fact for 
 him as for all of us; and that the change in him, 
 from hearty acceptance of Christian doctrine and 
 church organization to a rejection of the former and 
 something very like contempt for the latter, needed 
 explanation. That explanation he has sought in the 
 overthrow of the balance of Sterling's life through 
 repeated attacks of illness, which shut him out from 
 practical duties, and threw him entirely upon spe- 
 culation, thereby disproportionately developing the 
 negative side of him, already too strong from early 
 defects of education : and few persons will, we should 
 think, be found to deny Mr. Hare's general position, 
 that the pursuit of speculative philosophy as the
 
 248 JESS AYS. 
 
 business of life has this tendency; Mr. Carlyle, we 
 should have supposed, least of all men. But a special 
 cause interferes with Mr. Carlyle's recognition of the 
 principle as applicable to Sterling. Christianity as 
 understood commonly, perhaps everywhere except, it 
 may be, at Weimar and Chelsea, and church formulas 
 certainly as understood everywhere, he is in the habit 
 of classing under a category which in his hands has 
 become an extensive one that of shams. He calls 
 them by various forcible but ugly names, as " old 
 clothes," " spectral inanities," " gibbering phantoms," 
 or, with plainer meaning, "huge unveracities and 
 unrealities." That Sterling at any time of his life 
 accepted these for (l eternal verities" he cannot con- 
 sider a step from the "no" to the "yes," nor their 
 repudiation as a step backwards from the "yes" to 
 the "no." Let him speak for himself. He is com- 
 menting on Sterling's entry into orders as Mr Hare's 
 curate at Hurstmonceaux. 
 
 " Concerning this attempt of Sterling's to find sanctuary in the 
 old Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment in such 
 manner, there will at present he many opinions ; and mine must be 
 recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere pitying condemnation 
 of it, as a rash, false, unwise and unpennitted step. Nay, among the 
 evil lessons of his Time to poor Sterling I cannot but account this the 
 worst ; properly indeed, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn 
 apology and consecration, of all the evil lessons that were in it to 
 him. Alas, if we did remember the divine and awful nature of God's 
 Truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did
 
 CAELTLE'S LIFE OF STEELING. 249 
 
 before, should we, durst we in our most audacious moments, think 
 of wedding it to the world's Untruth, which is also, like all untruths, 
 the Devil's ? Only in the world's last lethargy can such things he 
 done, and accounted safe and pious ! Fools ! ' Do you think the 
 Living God is a huzzard idol,' sternly asks Milton, that you dare 
 address Him in this manner ? Such darkness, thick sluggish clouds 
 of cowardice and oblivious baseness, have accumulated on us ; thick- 
 ening as if towards the eternal sleep ! It is not now known, what 
 never needed proof or statement before, that Religion is not a doubt ; 
 that it is a certainty, or else a mockery and horror. That none or 
 all of the many things we are in doubt about, and need to have 
 demonstrated and rendered probable, can by any alchemy be made a 
 ' Religion ' for us ; but are and must continue a baleful, quiet or 
 unquiet, Hypocrisy for us ; and bring salvation, do we fancy ? I 
 think, it is another thing they will bring; and are, on all hands, 
 visibly bringing, this good while ! " 
 
 Herein consists the whole difference between Hare 
 and Carlyle in their views of Sterling's career. They 
 look at it from such opposite points that what is 
 the zenith to one is the nadir to the other. What 
 Sterling himself thought of it, was strikingly ex- 
 pressed to his brother, Captain Anthony Sterling, by 
 a comparison of his case "to that of a young lady 
 who has tragically lost her lover, and is willing to be 
 half-hoodwinked into a convent, or in any noble or 
 quasi-noble way to escape from a world, which has 
 become intolerable." The truth seems to be, that 
 Sterling went into orders under the combined in- 
 fluence of remorse for the share he had inadvertently 
 had in causing the disastrous fate of a near relative, 
 (Mr. Boyd, who was shot with Torrijos in Spain,)
 
 250 ESSAYS. 
 
 and of a gradual disenchantment from trust in mere 
 political schemes for the regeneration of mankind, 
 a disease more common to the genial young men of 
 his time than of ours. That while in the exercise of 
 his duties as a parish-priest he was energetic, useful, 
 and happy, the evidence in Mr. Hare's book is fully 
 sufficient to show. It is impossible to say whether 
 his scepticism would have come upon him had he 
 continued in that active career; but it is certainly 
 a gratuitous supposition of Mr. Carlyle that the ill- 
 health which put an end to it was only the outward 
 and ostensible cause of its termination, and does not 
 appear to be borne out by a single letter or expression 
 of Sterling's own. Indeed, for years after he left 
 Hurstmonceaux, he seemed to continue as firm in his 
 attachment to Christianity as when he was there; 
 though, on the other hand, it may well be doubted 
 whether a man of Sterling's intellect, who would 
 surrender his beliefs to Strauss's Leben Jesu, is likely 
 in the present day to keep them under any con- 
 ceivable circumstances. We think that Mr. Hare 
 on the one hand has attributed too exclusive an in- 
 fluence to Sterling's forced inactivity, and Mr. Carlyle 
 has certainly not taken it sufficiently into account as 
 a determining cause of his scepticism. 
 
 But whatever subject Mr. Carlyle takes up, and
 
 CAKLYLE'S LIFE OF STEELING. 251 
 
 whether he be right or wrong in his opinions, he is 
 sure to write an interesting book. He is never 
 wearisome, and whether his tale have been twice told 
 or not, he clothes it by his original treatment with an 
 attractive charm that few writers can lend even to an 
 entirely new subject. The maxim of the author of 
 Modern Antiquity, that 
 
 "True genius is the ray that flings 
 A novel light o'er common things," 
 
 has seldom been better illustrated than by this life of 
 Sterling. The facts are most of them neither new 
 nor of a nature in themselves to excite any very strong 
 interest, but the details of the life are told with such 
 simplicity, and yet with such constant reference to 
 the grand educational process which they collectively 
 make up, that one seems listening to a narrative by 
 Sterling's guardian angel, loving enough to sympa- 
 thize in the smallest minutiae, and wise enough to see 
 in each of them the greatness of the crowning result. 
 Nor is this impression in the least impaired by the 
 insignificance of the sum total of Sterling's actual 
 achievements. For had they been tenfold greater 
 than they were, they would have been as nothing in 
 the presence of that which Mr. Carlyle looks to as the 
 soul's great achievement heroic nobleness of struggle 
 and a calm abiding of the issue. After noticing the
 
 252 ZSSAYS. 
 
 purity of Sterling's character, and his conformity to 
 "the so-called moralities," his biographer goes on to 
 say 
 
 " In clear and perfect fidelity to Truth wherever found, in child- 
 like and soldierlike, pious and valiant loyalty to the Highest, and 
 what of good and evil that might send him, he excelled among good 
 men. The joys and the sorrows of his lot he took with true sim- 
 plicity and acquiescence. Like a true son, not like a miserable 
 mutinous rehel, he comported himself in this Universe. Extremity 
 of distress, and surely his fervid temper had enough of contra- 
 diction in this world, could not tempt him into impatience at any 
 time. By no chance did you ever hear from him a whisper of those 
 mean repinings, miserable arraignings and questionings of the Eternal 
 Power, such as weak souls even well disposed will sometimes give 
 way to in the pressure of their despair ; to the like of this he never 
 yielded, or showed the least tendency to yield ; which surely was 
 well on his part. For the Eternal Power, I still remark, will not 
 answer the like of this, but silently and terribly accounts it impious, 
 blasphemous, and damnable, and now as heretofore will visit it as 
 such. Not a rebel but a son, I said ; willing to suffer when Heaven 
 said, Thou shalt ; and withal, what is perhaps rarer in such a com- 
 bination, willing to rejoice also, and right cheerily taking the good 
 that was sent, whensoever or in whatever form it came. 
 
 "A pious soul we may justly call him; devoutly submissive to 
 the will of the Supreme in all things : the highest and sole essential 
 form which Religion can assume in man, and without which all forms 
 of religion are a mockery and a delusion in man." 
 
 Every one not personally acquainted with Sterling 
 will feel, that the great interest of the book is in the 
 light thrown by it on Mr. Carlyle's own belief. For 
 good or evil, Mr. Carlyle is a power in the country ; 
 and those who watch eagerly the signs of the times 
 have their eyes fixed upon him. What he would
 
 CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STEELING. 253 
 
 have us leave is plain enough, and that too with all 
 haste, as a sinking ship that will else carry us state, 
 church, and sacred property down along with it. 
 But whither would he have us fly? Is there firm 
 land, be it ever so distant? or is the wild waste of 
 waters, seething, warring round as far as eye can 
 reach, our only hope ? the pilot-stars, shining fitfully 
 through the parting of the storm-clouds, our only 
 guidance? There are hearts in this land almost 
 broken, whose old traditional beliefs, serving them at 
 least as moral supports, Mr. Carlyle and teachers like 
 him have undermined. Some betake themselves to 
 literature, as Sterling did j some fill up the void with 
 the excitement of politics ; others feebly bemoan their 
 irreparable loss, and wear an outward seeming of 
 universal irony and sarcasm. Mr. Carlyle has no 
 right, no man has any right, to weaken or destroy 
 a faith which he cannot or will not replace with a 
 loftier. We have no hesitation in saying, that the 
 language which Mr. Carlyle is in the habit of em- 
 ploying towards the religion of England and of 
 Europe is unjustifiable. He ought to have said 
 nothing, or he ought to have said more. Scraps 
 of verse from Goethe, and declamations, however 
 brilliantly they may be phrased, are but a poor com- 
 pensation for the slightest obscuring of tl the hope of
 
 254 ESSAYS. 
 
 immortality brought to light by the gospel," and by 
 it conveyed to the hut of the poorest man, to awaken 
 his crushed intelligence and lighten the load of his 
 misery. Mr. Carlyle slights, after his contemptuous 
 fashion, the poetry of his contemporaries : one of them 
 has uttered in song some practical wisdom which he 
 would do well to heed 
 
 " thou that after toil and storm 
 
 May'st seem to have reached a purer air, 
 "Whose faith has centre everywhere, 
 Nor cares to fix itself to form, 
 
 " Leave thou thy sister, when she prays, 
 Her early heaven, her happy views; 
 Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse 
 A life that leads melodious days. 
 
 "Her faith through form is pure as thine, 
 Her hands are quicker unto good. 
 Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood 
 To which she links a truth divine! 
 
 " See thou, that countest reason ripe 
 In holding by the law within, 
 Thou fail not in a world of sin, 
 And even for want of such a type." 
 
 This life of Sterling will be useful to the class 
 whose beliefs have given way before Mr. Carlyle's 
 destroying energies; because it furnishes hints, not 
 to be mistaken though not obtrusive, as to the extent 
 to which they must be prepared to go if they would 
 really be his disciples. If the path has in its very
 
 CAELYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 255 
 
 dangers an attraction for some, while others are 
 shudderingly repelled, in either case the result is 
 desirable, as it is the absence of certainty which 
 causes the pain and paralyzes the power of action. 
 At any rate, the doctrines of this teacher must be so 
 much more intelligible to the mass when applied, as 
 they are here, in commentary upon a life all whose 
 details are familiar, because it is the life of a contem- 
 porary and a countryman, that all who read must 
 inevitably be impressed with that great lesson of the 
 philosophic poet' 
 
 "The intellectual power through words and things 
 Goes sounding on, a dim and perilous way." 
 
 Though John Sterling is of course the principal 
 figure in the composition, and Mr. Carlyle's treatment 
 the great attraction of the book, yet the figures in the 
 background will be those to make most impression 
 on the general reader. Coleridge stands there in 
 striking but caricatured likeness ; and even his most 
 devoted admirers will not be sorry to see a portrait 
 of their master by such a hand : and all will curiously 
 observe the contrast between the sarcastic bitterness 
 which colours the drawing of the philosophic Chris- 
 tian, and the kindly allowance through which the 
 character of John Sterling's father, the famous 
 " Thunderer" of the Times, is delineated. We half
 
 259 ESSA TS. 
 
 suspect that Coleridge would have appeared to Mr. 
 Carlyle a much greater man, if he had allowed him 
 to declaim " Harpocrates-Stentor," as Sterling calls 
 him with trumpet voice and for time unlimited on 
 the divine virtues of Silence. There are besides, as 
 in all Mr. Carlyle's works, passages of wise thought 
 expressed in most felicitous language : of which not 
 the least important is this advice given to Sterling in 
 reference to his poetic aspirations. 
 
 " You can speak with supreme excellence ; sing with considerable 
 excellence you never can. And the Age itself, does it not, beyond 
 most ages, demand and require clear speech ; an Age incapable of 
 being sung to, in any but a trivial manner, till these convulsive 
 agonies and wild revolutionary overturnings readjust themselves? 
 Intelligible word of command, not musical psalmody and fiddling, is 
 , possible in this fell storm of battle. Beyond all ages, our Age ad- 
 monishes whatsoever thinking or writing man it has : Oh speak to me, 
 some wise intelligible speech; your wise meaning, in the shortest 
 and clearest way; behold, I am dying for want of wise meaning, 
 and insight into the devouring fact : speak, if you have any wisdom ! 
 As to song so-called, and your fiddling talent, even if you have one, 
 much more if you have none, we will talk of that a couple of 
 centuries hence, when things are calmer again. Homer shall be thrice 
 welcome ; but only when Troy is taken : alas, while the siege lasts, 
 and battle's fury rages everywhere, what can I do with the Homer ? 
 I want Achilleus and Odysseus, and am enraged to see them trying 
 to be Homers ! " 
 
 These "bricks from Babylon convey but scanty 
 intimation of the varied interest of the book. How- 
 ever the readers of it may differ from its opinions, 
 they cannot but find, even in Mr. Carlyle's mis-
 
 CAELTLE'S LIFE OF STERLING- 257 
 
 judgments and prejudices, ample matter for serious 
 reflection : for if he misjudges, it is generally because 
 he is looking too intently at a single truth, or a single 
 side of a truth; and such misjudgments are more 
 suggestive than the completest propositions of a less 
 earnest, keen-sighted, and impassioned thinker. He 
 is indeed more a prophet than a logician or a man of 
 science. And one lesson we may all learn from this, 
 as from everything he writes, and it is a lesson that 
 interferes with no creed, that honesty of purpose, 
 and resoluteness to do and to say the thing we "believe 
 to be the true thing, will give heart to a man's life, 
 when all ordinary motives to action and all ordinary 
 supports of energy have failed like a rotten reed.
 
 258 JSSSAYS. 
 
 "ESMOND." 
 
 Esmond is an autobiographical memoir of the first 
 five-and-thirty years of the life of an English gentle- 
 man of family, written in his old age after his 
 retirement to Virginia; and edited with an intro- 
 duction by his daughter, for the instruction and 
 amusement of her children and descendants, and to 
 give them a lively portrait of the noble gentleman her 
 father. It is historical, inasmuch as political events 
 enter both as motives to the actors and as facts in- 
 fluencing their fortunes, and because historical per- 
 sonages are brought upon the scene : both are necessary 
 elements in the career of a gentleman and a soldier, 
 but neither forms the staple or the main object of 
 the book, which concerns itself with the characters 
 and fortunes of the noble family of Castlewood, of 
 which Henry Esmond is a member. The period 
 embraced is from the accession of James the Second
 
 " ESMOND." 259 
 
 to the death of Queen Anne, and the manners de- 
 picted are those of the English aristocracy. Archae- 
 ology is not a special object with the author ; though 
 both costume, in its more limited sense, and manners, 
 are, we believe, accurately preserved. But Wardour 
 Street and the Royal Academy need fear no com- 
 petitor in Mr. Thackeray. His business lies mainly 
 with men and women, not with high-heeled shoes 
 and hoops and patches, and old china and carved 
 high-backed chairs. Nor have Mr. Macaulay's forth- 
 coming volumes been anticipated, except in one in- 
 stance, where the Chevalier St. George is brought 
 to England, has an interview with his sister at 
 Kensington just before her death, is absolutely present 
 in London at the proclamation of George the First, 
 and indeed only misses being James the Third, King 
 of Great Britain and Ireland, by grace of his own 
 exceeding baseness and folly. Scott, who had a 
 reverence for the Stuarts impossible to Mr. Thackeray 
 with his habit of looking at the actors in life from 
 the side-scenes and in the green-room rather than 
 from before the foot-lights, has not scrupled to take 
 a similar liberty with his Chevalier in Redgauntlet, 
 merely to arrange a striking tableau at the fall of 
 the curtain. But these violations of received tradition 
 with respect to such well-known historical personages, 
 S2
 
 260 USSAYS. 
 
 force upon the reader unnecessarily the fictitious 
 character of the narrative, and are therefore better 
 avoided. 
 
 There is abundance of incident in the book, but not 
 much more plot than in one of Defoe's novels: neither 
 is there, generally speaking, a plot in a man's life, 
 though there may be and often is in sections of it. 
 Unity is given not by a consecutive and self-de- 
 veloping story, but by the ordinary events of life 
 blended with those peculiar to a stirring time acting 
 on a family group, and bringing out and ripening 
 their qualities ; these again controlling the subsequent 
 events, just as happens in life. The book has the 
 great charm of reality. The framework is, as we 
 have said, historical: men with well-known names, 
 political, literary, military, pass and repass; their 
 sayings and doings are interwoven with the sayings 
 and doings of the fictitious characters ; and all reads 
 like a genuine memoir of the time. The rock ahead 
 of historical novelists is the danger of reproducing 
 too much of their raw material; making the art 
 visible by which they construct their image of a 
 bygone time; painting its manners and the outside 
 of its life with the sense of contrast with which men 
 of the present naturally view them, or looking at its 
 parties and its politics in the light of modern questions :
 
 "ESMOND." 261 
 
 the rock ahead of Mr. Thackeray, in particular, was 
 the temptation merely to dramatize his lectures : but 
 he has triumphed over these difficulties, and Queen 
 Anne's Colonel writes his life, and a very interesting 
 life it is, just as such a Queen Anne's Colonel might 
 be supposed to have written it. We shall give no 
 epitome of the story, because the merit of the book 
 does not lie there, and what story there is readers like 
 to find out for themselves. 
 
 Mr. Thackeray's humour does not mainly consist 
 in the creation of oddities of manner, habit, or feel- 
 ing; but in so representing actual men and women 
 as to excite a sense of incongruity in the reader's 
 mind a feeling that the follies and vices described 
 are deviations from an ideal of humanity always 
 present to the writer. The real is described vividly, 
 with that perception of individuality which con- 
 stitutes the artist; but the description implies and 
 suggests a standard higher than itself, not by any 
 direct assertion of such a standard, but by an un- 
 mistakeable irony. The moral antithesis of actual 
 and ideal is the root from which springs the peculiar 
 charm of Mr. Thackeray's writings; that mixture 
 of gaiety and seriousness, of sarcasm and tenderness, 
 of enjoyment and cynicism, which reflects so well the 
 contradictory consciousness of man as a being with
 
 262 ESSAYS. 
 
 senses and passions and limited knowledge, yet with 
 a conscience and a reason speaking to him of eternal 
 laws and a moral order of the universe. It is this 
 that makes Mr. Thackeray a profound moralist, just 
 as Hogarth showed his knowledge of perspective by 
 drawing a landscape throughout in violation of its 
 rules. So, in Mr. Thackeray's picture of society 
 as it is, society as it ought to be is implied. He 
 could not have painted Vanity Fair as he has, unless 
 Eden had been shining brightly in his inner eyes. 
 The historian of " snobs " indicates in every touch 
 his fine sense of a gentleman or a lady. No one 
 could be simply amused with Mr. Thackeray's de- 
 scriptions or his dialogues. A shame at one's own 
 defects, at the defects of the world in which one was 
 living, was irresistibly aroused along with the re- 
 ception of the particular portraiture. But while he 
 was dealing with his own age, his keen perceptive 
 faculty prevailed, and the actual predominates in his 
 pictures of modern society. His fine appreciation 
 of high character has hitherto been chiefly shown 
 (though with bright exceptions) by his definition of 
 its contrary. But, getting quite out of the region 
 of his personal experiences, he has shown his true 
 nature without this mask of satire and irony. The 
 ideal is no longer implied, but realized, in the two
 
 "ESMOND." 263 
 
 leading characters of Esmond. The medal is re- 
 versed, and what appeared as scorn of baseness is 
 revealed as love of goodness and nobleness what 
 appeared as cynicism is presented as a heart-worship 
 of what is pure, affectionate, and unselfish. He has 
 selected for his hero a very noble type of the Cavalier 
 softening into the man of the eighteenth century, and 
 for his heroine one of the sweetest women that ever 
 breathed from canvas or from book since Raffaelle 
 painted Maries and Shakspere created a new and 
 higher consciousness of woman in the mind of 
 Germanic Europe. Colonel Esmond is indeed a 
 fine gentleman, the accomplished man, the gallant 
 soldier, the loyal heart, and the passionate lover, 
 whose richly contrasted but harmonious character 
 Clarendon would have delighted to describe; while 
 Falkland and Richard Lovelace would have worn 
 him in their hearts' core. Lucy Hutchinson's 
 husband might have stood for his model in all but 
 politics, and his Toryism has in it more than a 
 smack of English freedom very much akin to that 
 noble patriot's Republicanism. Especially does he 
 recal Colonel Hutchinson in his lofty principle, his 
 unswerving devotion to it, a certain sweet seriousness 
 which comes in happily to temper a penetrating 
 intellect, and a faculty of seeing things and persons
 
 264 ESSAYS. 
 
 as they are, to which we owe passage after passage 
 in the book, that it requires no effort to imagine 
 Thackeray uttering himself in those famous lectures of 
 his, and looking up with his kind glance to catch the 
 delighted smile of his audience at his best points. 
 Nor is there anything unartistic in this reminder of 
 the author ; for this quality of clear insight into men 
 and things united with a kindly nature and a large 
 capacity for loving is not limited to any particular 
 time or age, and combines with Colonel Esmond's 
 other qualities so as to give no impression of incon- 
 gruity. But besides the harmonizing effect of this 
 sweetly serious temperament, the record of Colonel 
 Esmond's life is throughout a record of his attach- 
 ment to one woman, towards whom his childish 
 gratitude for protection grows with his growth into 
 a complex feeling, in which filial affection and an 
 unconscious passion are curiously blended. So un- 
 conscious, indeed, is the passion, that, though the 
 reader has no difficulty in interpreting it, Esmond 
 himself is for years the avowed and persevering 
 though hopeless lover of this very lady's daughter. 
 The relation between Esmond and Rachel Viscountess 
 Castlewood is of that sort that nothing short of 
 consummate skill could have saved it from becoming 
 ridiculous or offensive, or both. In Mr. Thackeray's
 
 "ESMOND." 265 
 
 hands, the difficulty has become a triumph, and has 
 given rise to beauties which a safer ambition would 
 have not dared to attempt. The triumph is attained 
 by the conception of Lady Castlewood's character. 
 She is one of those women who never grow old, 
 because their lives are in the affections, and the 
 suffering that comes upon such lives only brings out 
 strength and beauty unperceived before. The graces 
 of the girl never pass away, but maturer loveliness 
 is added to them, and spring, summer, autumn, all 
 bloom on their faces and in their hearts at once. 
 A faint foreshadowing of this character we have had 
 before in Helen Pendennis: but she had been de- 
 pressed and crushed in early life, had married for 
 a home, certainly without passion; and her nature 
 was chilled and despondent. Lady Castlewood has 
 the development that a happy girlhood, and a 
 marriage with the man she devoutly loves, can give 
 to a woman; and her high spirit has time to grow 
 for her support when it is needed. Even the weak- 
 nesses of her character are but as dimples on a lovely 
 face, and make us like her the better for them, 
 because they give individuality to what might else 
 be felt as too ideal. Nothing can be more true or 
 touching than the way this lady demeans herself 
 when she finds her husband's affection waning from
 
 266 USSATS. 
 
 her ; and Mr. Thackeray is eminently Mr. Thackeray 
 in his delineation of that waning love on the one side, 
 and the strength and dignity which the neglected 
 wife gradually draws from her own hitherto untried 
 resources, when she ceases to lean on the arm that 
 was withdrawn, and discovers that the heart she 
 had worshipped was no worthy idol. But to those 
 who would think the mother "slow" we can have 
 no hesitation in recommending the daughter. Miss 
 Beatrix Esmond familiarly and correctly termed 
 t{ Trix " by her friends is one of those dangerous 
 young ladies who fascinate every one, man or woman, 
 that they choose to fascinate, but care for nobody but 
 themselves; and their care for themselves simply 
 extends to the continual gratification of a boundless 
 love of admiration, and the kind of power which 
 results- from it. If Miss Rebecca Sharpe had really 
 been a Montmorency, and a matchless beauty, and 
 a maid of honour to a Queen, she might have sub- 
 limated into a Beatrix Esmond. It is for this proud, 
 capricious, and heartless beauty, that Henry Esmond 
 sighs out many years of his life, and does not find 
 out, till she is lost to him and to herself, how much 
 he loves her "little mamma," as the saucy young 
 lady is fond of calling Lady Castlewood. Beatrix 
 belongs to the class of women who figure most in
 
 "ESMOND." 267 
 
 history, with eyes as bright and hearts as hard as 
 diamonds, as Mary Stuart said of herself; and Mary 
 Stuart and Miss Esmond have many points in 
 common. Of her end we are almost disposed to say 
 with Othello, " Oh ! the pity of it, lago, oh ! the pity 
 of it." Unlovely as she is because unloving, yet her 
 graces are too fair to be so dragged through the dirt 
 that stream is too bright to end in a city sewer. 
 But the tragedy is no less tragical for the tawdry 
 comedy of its close. Life has no pity for the pitiless, 
 no sentiment for those who trample on love as a 
 weakness. 
 
 These three characters are the most prominent in 
 the book. With one or the other of the two women 
 Henry Esmond's thoughts are almost always en- 
 gaged ; and it is to win the reluctant love of the 
 daughter that he seeks distinction as a soldier, a 
 politician, and finally a conspirator in behalf of the 
 son of King James. In this threefold career, he has 
 intercourse with Addison, Steele, and the wits ; serves 
 under Marlborough at Blenheim and Ramilies ; is on 
 terms of intimacy with St. John and the Tory leaders. 
 A succession of Viscounts Castlewood figure on the 
 scene, all unmistakeable English noblemen of the 
 Stuart period. A dowager Viscountess is a more 
 faithful than flattering portrait of a class of ladies of
 
 268 ESSAYS. 
 
 rank of that time. The Chevalier St. George appears 
 oftener than once. The great Duke of Hamilton is 
 about to make Beatrix his Duchess, when he is 
 basely murdered in that doubly fatal duel with the 
 execrable Lord Mohun, who had twelve years before 
 slain, also in a duel, my Lord Viscount Castlewood, 
 the father of Beatrix. The book has certainly no 
 lack of incident ; the persons come and go as on the 
 scene of real life ; and all are clearly conceived, and 
 sketched or painted in full with no uncertain aim 
 or faltering hand. To draw character has been the 
 predominant object of the author ; and he has so done 
 it as to sustain a lively interest and an agreeable 
 alternation of emotions, through a form of com- 
 position particularly difficult to manage without be- 
 coming soon tedious, or breaking the true conditions 
 of the form. Mr. Thackeray has overcome not only 
 this self-imposed difficulty, but one greater still, 
 which he could not avoid his own reputation. 
 Esmond will, we think, rank higher as a work of 
 art than either Vanity Fair, or Pendennis ; because 
 the characters are of a higher type, and drawn with 
 greater finish, and the book is more of a complete 
 whole : not that we anticipate for it anything like 
 the popularity of the former of these two books, as 
 it is altogether of a graver cast, the satire is not
 
 "ESMOND." 269 
 
 so pungent, the canvas is far less crowded, and 
 the subject is distant and unfamiliar ; and, may 
 be, its excellences will not help it to a very large 
 public. 
 
 The Spectator, 
 Nov. 6, 1852.
 
 270 ESSAYS. 
 
 "MY NOVEL. 
 
 OR, VARIETIES OF ENGLISH LIFE." 
 
 MR. CAXTON junior has, he informs us, written his 
 novel with the twofold purpose of making up the 
 deficit in his annual income caused by the repeal 
 of the Corn-laws, and of doing his part to counteract 
 the effect of incendiary publications, by exhibiting 
 the rural aristocracy, and generally the richer classes, 
 in a truer and kindlier light than that which is 
 thrown upon them by the dark lantern of Socialist, 
 Radical, or Free-trade Diogenes. The second title 
 of the work implies even a broader and more philo- 
 sophic purpose. For while every English novel 
 must represent varieties of English life, that which 
 assumes to do this in a special sense must be in- 
 tended to display the ^relations of one part of our 
 social fabric to another, and to trace a wise design, 
 a unity of aim, a complex harmony, in the whole
 
 "MY NOVEL." 271 
 
 made up of these varieties. The first of Mr. Caxton's 
 objects have doubtless been obtained; the other has 
 not been accomplished either in its wider or its 
 narrower sense. Mr. Caxton does not specify the 
 dangerous works to which his own is designed to be 
 an antidote ; and he remarks in the course of it that 
 it is easier to live down than to write down in- 
 flammatory class appeals. We are rejoiced to agree 
 with him, that a kind-hearted sensible squire and 
 a good parson are likely to do more in the recon- 
 cilement of classes than any books which he can 
 write ; and the more, because he seems not to have 
 mastered the first element of success in his under- 
 taking a knowledge of the mischief to be en- 
 countered, and of the causes which have produced it. 
 It is not generally supposed that Socialist schemes 
 or democratic rhetoric have found their way very 
 extensively to the intellect and passions of the agri- 
 cultural poor in England; nor, so far as landowners 
 and parsons have been the objects of invective, has 
 want of kindliness and benevolence been the vice 
 attributed to them. Cordial good-nature and a frank 
 dignity are the popular attributes of the "good old 
 English gentleman"; and had such qualities been 
 sufficient to prevent what is called, by a rhetorical 
 exaggeration, in this country at least, ''the war of
 
 272 ESSAYS. 
 
 classes," that war would never have broken out. 
 But, unfortunately, these very country gentlemen 
 u our territorial aristocracy," as Mr. Disraeli is fond 
 of calling them with all their virtues, had a natural 
 tendency to high rents ; and being in possession at 
 one time of paramount legislative power, they passed 
 laws which gave them artificially high rents at the 
 expense of the rest of the community. This is the 
 origin of what was certainly a combat between classes ; 
 but that is over now. How far English land- 
 owners have forgotten that property has its duties 
 as well as its rights and enjoyments, is quite another 
 question; and if Mr. Caxton wishes to go into it, 
 he will find that fancy-portraits of a model squire 
 and a model parson are but dust in the balance against 
 the facts represented by the words rural pauperism, 
 rural ignorance, and rural brutality. If he wants to 
 know as he seems to have rather a Pall Mall notion 
 of country life what these words mean, let him 
 consult Sidney Godolphin Osborne and Charles 
 Kingsley, who are both gentlemen and parsons work- 
 ing among the agricultural poor. 
 
 Granted that a goodnatured squire, with eight 
 thousand acres of land, arable and pasture, and not 
 a mortgage on it, aided by a parson with a decent 
 income or even one who can give to the "res
 
 "MY NOVEL." 273 
 
 angusta dorai " the dignity that high character, good 
 manners, and intellectual accomplishments, will bestow 
 may do great things for a parish. The sagacious 
 Mrs. Glasse prefaces her receipt for hare-soup by the 
 pithy direction, first catch your hare. So, we say, 
 first put your unencumbered well-meaning squire and 
 your phoenix parson in every parish in England, or 
 in the majority of parishes, and then will be time 
 enough to discuss what good may be got out of 
 them. It is the burdened estates preventing im- 
 provement, and the parsons careless, sauntering, often 
 with little more intellectual cultivation and much 
 less practical knowledge and good sense than their 
 farmers these are the things that constitute the cir- 
 cumstances with which we have to deal in too many 
 of our country parishes, and which have borne fruit 
 in the fearful triad the consideration of which we 
 recommended to Mr. Caxton's notice. 
 
 But our novelist does not seem to know what 
 to do with his squire and parson when he has found 
 or invented them. A considerable vagueness as to 
 the daily life, business, enjoyments, and manners of 
 an English village, must have come over the mind 
 of Pisistratus while he was in Australia making the 
 fortune which he, not prescient of Free-trade iniquities, 
 was rash enough to invest in Uncle Rowland's acres ; 
 T
 
 274 ESSAYS. 
 
 or, with the object he announces, he would certainly 
 have given us some more definite picture of our 
 sweet country life, with its immemorial charms, and 
 of the duties and pleasures of a great proprietor and 
 a country rector, than is to be found in My Novel. 
 We always thought it spoilt the energetic moral of 
 The Caxtons, that Pisistratus should rush back to 
 the old country the moment he had made a few 
 thousand pounds. He ought to have become an 
 Australian "gentleman"; that would have had sig- 
 nificance. But now that all his agricultural ex- 
 perience has not enabled him to invent a more novel 
 or more useful function for a squire and his bene- 
 volence and his capital, than to set him employing 
 labour during a hard season unproductively, in digging 
 a fish-pond that he didn't want, we begin to suspect 
 Pisistratus of being a charlatan, and that he neither 
 knows nor cares much in his heart about agriculture, 
 and country gentlemen, and the rural poor. It was 
 not on the Palatine that Virgil heard the hum of 
 the bees, or smelt the sweet thyme, whose music and 
 fragrance have been for nearly two thousand years 
 wafting the country all brightness, melody, and 
 perfume into close chambers, into walled-up cities, 
 into crowded streets, and dismal alleys ; and it is not 
 in Pall Mall that one can learn those secrets of the
 
 "MY NOVEL." 275 
 
 country which if reproduced in a book would breathe 
 from its pages May-bloom and new-mown hay, calm 
 delights, unwearying occupations, robust and ani- 
 mated health not even in the country, if one carried 
 thither a Pall Mall mind and heart. There is about 
 Mr. Caxton's picture of Hazeldean and its master 
 of the same name Hazeldean of Hazeldean the 
 rhetorical vagueness and want of detail which betray 
 the writer aiming at a generalization but having no 
 knowledge or vivid sense of the particulars ; not that 
 the sort of man is not well enough described novels 
 and London experience would serve for that but 
 there is no presentation of that country-gentleman 
 life, with its accessaries which is necessary for the 
 attainment of the author's professed purpose. Imagine 
 a picture of our rural life with no tenant farmers, 
 and this too by a man who professes to exhibit that 
 life with a practical aim ! But even the artist, were 
 he of a high and conscientious intellect, could not 
 omit so essential a feature of the moral rustic land- 
 scape. In fact, Mr. Hazeldean of Hazeldean is de- 
 scribed ; and his park and house, and wife and sister, 
 and parish-stocks and parson and bailiff, are described 
 too, and as a picture of still-life we have no ob- 
 jection to the descriptions : what is wanting is action 
 and dialogue bearing upon the main purpose of the 
 T2
 
 276 ESSAYS. 
 
 book, for of action and dialogue of the ordinary 
 novel sort there is plenty, and amusing enough. The 
 mere existence of such folks as our best country 
 gentlemen and their families may be a startling 
 novelty to an American, or an Australian who has for- 
 gotten the old country; and rural discontent may seem 
 to such a stranger at first sight unaccountable, though 
 we are by no means sure that he would not fix upon 
 that as its inevitable cause, with his colonial feelings 
 about the relative value of independence and comfort. 
 But one who pretends to be alive to the animosities 
 of classes in England might know that he is con- 
 tributing no novelty when he simply informs us of 
 the existence of a cordial, manly, somewhat irritable, 
 middle-aged gentleman, who is proud of his eight 
 thousand acres, considers the landed interest identical 
 with the constitution, but with all his pride and 
 irritability, and prejudice and narrowness, remembers 
 that a Hazeldean of Hazeldean has duties, and does 
 for "his poor" all that his limited conscience and 
 feeble inventive faculties suggest to him. These 
 general characteristics of the country gentleman, as 
 statistical facts, we are all familiar with. But our 
 author fails both in his aim as social physician, and 
 in dramatic presentation of his subject, when he 
 contents himself with a vague general conception,
 
 "JfF NOVEL." 277 
 
 and labels his dramatis personal, instead of developing 
 them in action. The Hazeldeans of Hazeldean have 
 for hundreds of years influenced directly the villages 
 in which they have lived and ruled, and have in- 
 directly contributed peculiar elements to the national 
 character, and no slight bias to the national policy. 
 To present this general truth dramatically, would 
 be to make it felt and appreciated more profoundly 
 and by a wider circle, and is an aim worthy of an 
 English gentleman and literary artist. But to do 
 this, he must show his type of the class in action, as 
 landlord, master, neighbour, sportsman, magistrate, 
 a paternal despot in his village, a free and kindly 
 man in his family, a gentleman and an aristocrat 
 among his peers. For it is by action in all these 
 and more capacities that the Hazeldeans of Hazeldean 
 are what they are ; not by being dummies, with all 
 these titles painted up underneath them. And what 
 makes My Novel a more striking failure is, that an 
 active life of this range and variety is more capable 
 and easy of artistic treatment than that of most 
 workers among us would be, in proportion as it is 
 at once less special and mechanical than that of the 
 professional man, the merchant, the shopkeeper, and 
 artificer, and less abstract than that of the statesman 
 and politician. It deals on the one hand with natural
 
 278 
 
 objects and processes of production of vital impor- 
 tance to a nation, with agents, phenomena, and 
 scenery, delightful to the imagination as well as 
 interesting to the understanding; while on the other 
 hand, it has to do with the government of men, on 
 such a scale as to admit of that individualized treat- 
 ment which gives the direct human interest, so diffi- 
 cult to realize in those legislative or administrative 
 processes in which the masses are dealt with on 
 broad generalizations, and regarded not so much as 
 individual men, but as the constituent elements of 
 blue-books and statistical tables. To show all this 
 living on the canvas, would indeed have been to 
 do something for the order to which our author 
 belongs by birth, estate, and county-membership. 
 It would have been still more to the purpose to 
 show how these same Hazeldeans, worthy and love- 
 able race though they are, are to develop into the 
 landowners of a new era, and in increased knowledge, 
 energy and enterprise, are not to lose the old charm 
 of frankness, kindness, and pride of gentlemen; to 
 make us feel how these country gentlemen may 
 still be, as they ought to be from their position and 
 antecedents, the leaders of agricultural improvement, 
 the true aristocracy of an industrial people. But 
 for all this, practical knowledge, and, what is more,
 
 "XT NOVEL." 279 
 
 genuine earnestness, would have been needed; and 
 it was easier to write a novel of commonplace material 
 dexterously constructed, and spiced with a proper 
 amount of the old familiar sentiment and the new 
 pseudo-Shandyism, which is the merest reflection 
 from books. 
 
 If, leaving these country folks with the general 
 acknowledgment, that, so far as description can be 
 a substitute for dialogue and action, they are well 
 described, and nice points of character seized, and 
 a pleasing impression of the Hazeldean family pro- 
 duced, we trace the purpose of the author in the 
 other characters of the book extending through four 
 volumes, but in quantity nearly equalling three 
 ordinary novels we confess ourselves utterly puzzled 
 to detect any difference as regards aim and philo- 
 sophic depth between this and any other novel 
 by the same author, or indeed any ll fashionable 
 novel" of the day. We have in addition to the 
 Hazeldeans, father, son, wife, and sister, and the 
 parson and wife, a Cabinet Minister burdened with 
 a secret remorse his friend Lord Lestrange, all that 
 is charming, good, and elevated, but crushed and 
 repressed by a regret dating twenty years back a 
 scheming young gentleman, a relative of the Cabinet 
 Minister, and the villain of the piece a semi-Jew
 
 280 ESSAYS. 
 
 baron, ci-devant solicitor, who lends money and lives 
 in " the first society," and calls the Cabinet Minister 
 " my dear fellow" an Italian nobleman in exile, 
 with his daughter another Italian nobleman and his 
 sister, plotting against the former a peasant poet, 
 who wins his way to eminence, and turns out to be 
 the legitimate son of a great man an uncle by the 
 mother's side of the poet, who returns from America 
 with a fortune, and becomes a manufacturer and 
 finally a man of fashion and M.P. for a borough : all 
 these we have, and a very complex and interesting 
 story is made out of their combinations; there are 
 even scenes of great power, of the sort that Macready 
 on the stage could have given prodigious effect to : 
 but the purpose of the book seems clean gone out 
 of the writer's mind, and we can conceive any novel 
 of the season doing just as much and just as little 
 to knit closer the ties that bind class to class in 
 England, or to make one class appreciate and look 
 with truer and kindlier eye on the others. 
 
 Indeed, there are characters in My Novel, and 
 there is a pervading tone, which, so far from har- 
 monizing men of different degrees and different oc- 
 cupations in our land, seem to us calculated, if they 
 had any practical effect, to do just the opposite. Mr. 
 Sprott the tinker, whose pleasure it is gratuitously
 
 "MY NOVEL." 281 
 
 to enlighten his rustic brethren on the question of 
 their rights and the wrongs of the rich, is not a 
 flattering specimen of the poor man political. But 
 let him pass as a sketch and a scarecrow. Mr. 
 Richard Avenel, the maker of his own fortune, the 
 manufacturer, and Radical borough M.P., may too 
 be a portrait from life ; we do not doubt that worse 
 men and vulgarer men have sat and are sitting in the 
 House of Commons: but he is still an outrageous 
 caricature, were he " liker than life," because he is 
 presented here as the type of a class, and as the com- 
 mercial analogue of the Hazeldeans of Hazeldean. 
 He is the prosperous middle-class man, as he appears 
 to the horrified vision of May Fair and Almacks; 
 not even to those artificial eyes quite devoid of a 
 certain rude strength and rough utility, but with all 
 that, a singularly absurd, coarse, selfish, grasping, 
 tyrannical, title-hunting, and unpleasant "intrus." 
 Nor, broad as is the canvas spread, and facile as is 
 the master's hand, does that great "people," without 
 which English "society" is a capital without a 
 column, gain admission even to the background of 
 the picture, except as a group of undistinguishable 
 grumbling rustics in one corner, and a corrupt and 
 equally undistinguishable borough constituency in 
 another. A deep and inbred contempt for the
 
 282 ASSAYS. 
 
 middle class would be the only interpretation of a 
 picture of English society which ignored or only 
 sarcastically noticed them, were it not to be ex- 
 plained by a defect in this author's genius and 
 sympathies, alike fatal to him as philosophic politician 
 or as philosophic artist. 
 
 And this is, that of the English world, which it 
 is his vocation to paint and to influence, he knows 
 and comprehends and cares for only the lightest froth 
 dancing on the surface. We have seen that in his 
 village he could conceive and describe his characters 
 of squire and parson with their families ; below this 
 he could not even go by description, and he fails 
 to exhibit even them as actors in the real interests 
 of their lives. It is the same when his scene is 
 transferred to London. Dandies and fine ladies 
 men and women upon whom life forces no serious 
 duties, and who are not great enough to impose them 
 on themselves dress, talk, flirt, and intrigue upon 
 his stage. Even the political life which is bound 
 up in England with fashionable life he touches with 
 the vaguest, dreamiest pencil, and as if none of the 
 substantive interests and manly virtues with which 
 it is concerned had ever made themselves felt by 
 him. He can understand it as an exciting personal 
 game, more absorbing and more reputable than
 
 "MY NOVEL." 283 
 
 hazard, with great prizes for those who can win 
 them, and draughts of Nepenthe for those whose 
 youth has left behind it little but gnawing regrets. 
 But as the highest form of business, or the serious 
 passion of serious men, and the duty of those whose 
 rank and fortune release them from the ordinary 
 duties of the less wealthy and eminent, we do not 
 mean to say that he cannot form the conception or 
 use the phrases, but it is not that view of political 
 life with which he sympathises, or which his genius 
 aspires to represent among the varieties of English 
 life. Nor, indeed, apart from motives, does he 
 dramatically represent the life of a political leader. 
 Here again he can form the conception, describe the 
 man ; but his portrait wants details that is, it wants 
 knowledge, his statesman does nothing as a states- 
 man. It cannot be in this case that life has pre- 
 sented no models to the writer. His manhood must 
 have been passed in the familiar society of political 
 Englishmen of the higher rank. It must be that his 
 genius is not receptive of this sort of experience; 
 that it presents to his imagination no beauty or 
 interest; it is not available to him for purposes of 
 art. Go even into a class with which he ought to 
 be more familiar still, among the men of letters : we 
 have in this book three distinct types from this class,
 
 284 ESSAYS. 
 
 Leonard, the poet ; Henry Norreys, the man who 
 follows literature with the diligence and sobriety of 
 a lawyer; and John Burley, the reckless, dissipated 
 man of genius, who is always out at elbows, 
 eloquently drunk, and dies of delirium tremens. The 
 two latter are strongly marked types, and we know 
 precisely the sort of men intended, if not the very 
 men who sat for the portraits. But this is know- 
 ledge we bring to the book, not knowledge we get 
 from it. There is little dramatic power in the re- 
 presentation ; we easily fill up features so strongly 
 marked, and we must not put down to the credit of 
 the artist what belongs really to the subject and to 
 our own familiarity with a class. Leonard, on the 
 other hand, upon whom much more talk is lavished, 
 remains in his poetical character a mere nominis 
 umbra; not a characteristic of his genius is made 
 real and intelligible to us; he cannot have been as 
 poet and man of letters clearly and distinctly before 
 the author's eye. Thus, even with those classes of 
 society with which he must be familiar, he cannot 
 deal dramatically : he has not the genius for pre- 
 senting individual character, the primary dramatic 
 faculty; much less the faculty requiring so much 
 study, observation, and superiority to conventional 
 prejudices, in addition to dramatic genius of pre-
 
 " MY NOVEL." 285 
 
 senting class characters individualized, the distinctive 
 features of the man moulded and coloured by the 
 work he does, representative therefore of the social 
 function and peculiarities of their class, true typal 
 varieties of English life. It is needless to add, that 
 of the working lives and that means the serious 
 portion of the lives of the merchant, the manu- 
 facturer, the lawyer, and other "working classes," 
 not the faintest representation is conveyed. Baron 
 Levy and Randal Leslie, who plot together against 
 the fortunes of their fellow "varieties," are the only 
 "working men" really exhibited in that which is 
 their business and function. In a word, it is only 
 the amusements, the pleasures, and the passions of the 
 idle members of English society, which Sir Edward 
 Bulwer Lytton has ever succeeded in painting. He 
 cannot paint the busy classes, even in their pleasures 
 and their family life and their passions not even those 
 who belong to his " society" because the serious 
 occupations and interests of men and women affect 
 their pleasures and their passions; and with these 
 and the characters they form he has no adequate 
 acquaintance and sympathy. So, as we said, he 
 paints the froth of society ; and very gay froth it is, 
 and very pretty bubbles he can make of it : but this 
 is not reconciling classes, or giving a philosophic
 
 286 ESSAYS. 
 
 representation in fiction of the great organic being 
 we call the English nation ; and so far as My Novel 
 pretends to be anything more than anybody else's 
 novel, anything more than a well-wrought story, 
 constructed out of the old Bulwer-Lytton materials, 
 the pretence is fabulous and the performance does 
 not answer to it. We have a novel neither better 
 nor worse than its predecessors ; but we have not 
 a great work of art reared on a basis so broad as 
 a general survey of English life in the earlier half 
 of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Would such a work of art be possible ? A mirror 
 that should show to a nation of workers to a nation 
 whose family hearth is dear and sacred, to a nation 
 that is earnest, practical, grave and religious its 
 own life, complex and multitudinous, as it might 
 reflect itself upon the imagination of a great poet, 
 who to masculine understanding trained by obser- 
 vation and study should add the large heart and 
 the clear eye to which nothing human is uninteresting 
 or blank ? Homer did something of this sort for the 
 Greece of his day ; Dante for the Italy of his ; 
 Shakspere for the Europe of his. These men knew 
 not such a word as commonplace or low, except as 
 applied to what is stupid and base. The broad field 
 of human life was to them a field of beauty, richly
 
 "J/T NOVEL." 287 
 
 clothed with food and flowers for the sustenance and 
 nourishment of a vigorous imagination. Art can 
 indeed harmonize classes when the artist is such as 
 these, when, on the one hand, the dignity and 
 worth of the various callings that minister to the 
 convenience and promote the improvement of a nation, 
 are illustrated by viewing them as harmonious parts 
 of a great whole ; and on the other, when the men 
 who pursue these callings are represented with the 
 interesting varieties impressed upon the common 
 humanity by circumstances and education, but still 
 as not having that common humanity obliterated and 
 replaced by some ludicrous or mean features, charac- 
 teristic, it may be, of their occupation, but not cha- 
 racteristic of men to whom an occupation should be 
 a servant and not a master. Till art deals again as 
 it did in its mighty youth with common life with 
 that which is the business of a busy struggling 
 world neither will art regain its strength and renew 
 its youth, nor will common life reappear to us with 
 the freshness and the sacredness which it had to the 
 eye of those who first became self-conscious and burst 
 into song. Dandy literature and superfine sensi- 
 bilities are tokens and causes of a degenerate art and 
 an emasculate morality ; and among offenders in this 
 way none has sinned more, or is of higher mark for
 
 288 ESSAYS. 
 
 a gibbet, than the author of My Novel. Such books 
 as his, when they appear in their true characters, 
 are judged according to one standard ; but when they 
 come in the guise of profound meaning and lofty 
 aims, and give themselves the airs of being grand 
 concrete philosophies, the judge looks at them in 
 quite another light, tries them by a higher code, and 
 condemns them accordingly, as well-dressed impostors. 
 
 The Spectator, 
 
 February 19, 1853.
 
 ' BLEAK HOUSE: 
 
 DICKENS'S "BLEAK HOUSE." 
 
 "I BELIEVE I have never had so many readers," 
 says Mr. Dickens in the preface to Bleak House, 
 "as in this book." We have no doubt that he has 
 the pleasantest evidence of the truth of this con- 
 viction in the balance-sheet of his publishing- 
 account; and, without any more accurate knowledge 
 of the statistics of his circulation than the indications 
 furnished by limited personal observation, we should 
 not be surprised to find that Punch and the Times 
 newspaper were his only rivals in this respect. What- 
 ever such a fact may not prove, it does prove incon- 
 testably that Mr. Dickens has a greater power of 
 amusing the book-buying public of England than 
 any other living writer ; and moreover establishes, 
 what we should scarcely have thought probable, that 
 his power of amusing is not weakened now that the 
 novelty of his style has passed away, nor his public 
 
 u
 
 290 JSSSATS. 
 
 wearied by the repetition of effects in which truth 
 of nature and sobriety of thought are largely sacri- 
 ficed to mannerism and point. Author and public 
 react upon each other; and it is no wonder that a 
 writer, who finds that his peculiar genius and his 
 method of exhibiting it secure him an extensive and 
 sustained popularity, should be deaf to the remon- 
 strances of critics when they warn him of defects that 
 his public does not care for, or urge him to a change 
 of method which might very probably thin his audience 
 for the immediate present, and substitute the quiet 
 approval of the judicious for the noisy and profitable 
 applause of crowded pit and gallery. Intellectual 
 habits, too, become strengthened by use, and a period 
 comes in the life of a man of genius when it is hope- 
 less to expect from him growth of faculty or cor- 
 rection of faults. 
 
 Bleak House is, even more than any of its pre- 
 decessors, chargeable with not simply faults, but 
 absolute want of construction. A novelist may 
 invent an extravagant or an uninteresting plot may 
 fail to balance his masses, to distribute his light and 
 shade may prevent his story from marching, by 
 episode and discursion : but Mr. Dickens discards 
 plot, while he persists in adopting a form for his 
 thoughts to which plot is essential, and where the
 
 " BLEAK HO USE." 291 
 
 absence of a coherent story is fatal to continuous 
 interest. In Bleak House, the series of incidents 
 which form the outward life of the actors and talkers 
 has no close and necessary connexion ; nor have they 
 that higher interest that attaches to circumstances 
 which powerfully aid in modifying and developing 
 the original elements of human character. The 
 great Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which 
 serves to introduce a crowd of persons as suitors, 
 lawyers, law-writers, law-stationers, and general 
 spectators of Chancery business, has positively not 
 the smallest influence on the character of any one 
 person concerned ; nor has it any interest of itself. 
 Mr. Richard Carstone is not made reckless and un- 
 steady by his interest in the great suit, but simply 
 expends his recklessness and unsteadiness on it, as 
 he would on something else if it were non-existent. 
 This great suit is lugged in by the head and 
 shoulders, and kept prominently before the reader, 
 solely to give Mr. Dickens the opportunity of in- 
 dulging in stale and commonplace satire upon the 
 length and expense of Chancery proceedings, and 
 exercises absolutely no influence on the characters 
 and destinies of any one person concerned in it. The 
 centre of the arch has nothing to do in keeping the 
 arch together. The series of incidents which answers 
 U2
 
 292 ISSAYS. 
 
 to what in an ordinary novel is called plot, is that 
 connected with the relationship of the heroine (again 
 analogically speaking) to her mother. Lady Dedlock, 
 who when first introduced to the reader is a stately 
 lady of the supremest fashion, has before her 
 marriage with Sir Leicester Dedlock given birth to 
 an illegitimate child, whom she supposes to have died 
 in its birth, but who, under the name of Esther 
 Summerson, was brought up in obscurity. The 
 truth becomes known to her Ladyship, and is ferreted 
 out by the family solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn; a 
 person of eminently respectable standing, but incom- 
 prehensible motives, who tortures Lady Dedlock with 
 mysterious hints, and afterwards direct menaces of 
 disclosing her shame to her husband ; at which stage 
 of the proceedings he is shot in his chambers. The 
 reader is so artfully tempted to suspect Lady Dedlock 
 of the deed, that all but the simplest will at once 
 conclude that a theatrical surprise is meditated ; and 
 accordingly, the real culprit turns out to be Lady 
 Dedlock's French maid, whom Mr. Tulkinghorn had 
 used in discovering the secret, and afterwards treated 
 with harshness and contumely, that roused her ma- 
 lignant temper to a murderous revenge. The secret, 
 however, is not buried with Mr. Tulkinghorn ; and, 
 maddened by fear of discovery and open shame, Lady
 
 " BLEAK HO USE." 293 
 
 Dedlock flies from her home, and dies of exhaustion 
 at the entrance of a wretched City churchyard, where 
 her lover was buried, and where she is found by her 
 daughter and a detective policeman who had been 
 sent in quest of her. Literally, we have here given 
 the whole of what can by any stretch of the term 
 be called the main plot of Bleak House. And not 
 only is this story both meagre and melodramatic, and 
 disagreeably reminiscent of that vilest of modern 
 books Reynolds's Mysteries of London, but it is so 
 unskilfully managed that the daughter is in no way 
 influenced either in character or destiny by her 
 mother's history; and the mother, her husband, the 
 prying solicitor, the French maid, and the whole 
 Dedlock set, might be eliminated from the book 
 without damage to the great Chancery suit, or per- 
 ceptible effect upon the remaining characters. We 
 should then have less crowd, and no story ; and the 
 book might be called " Bleak House, or the Odd 
 Folks that have to do with a long Chancery Suit." 
 This would give an exact notion of the contents of 
 a collection of portraits embracing suitors, solicitors, 
 law-writers, law-stationers, money-lenders, law-clerks, 
 articled and not-articled, with their chance friends and 
 visitors, and various members of their respective 
 families. Even then, a comprehensive etcastera would
 
 294 ESSAYS. 
 
 be needed for supernumeraries. So crowded is the 
 canvas which Mr. Dickens has stretched, and so 
 casual the connexion that gives to his composition 
 whatever unity it has, that a daguerreotype of Fleet 
 Street at noon-day would be the aptest symbol to be 
 found for it; though the daguerreotype would have 
 the advantage in accuracy of representation. In 
 addition to all other faults of construction, the heroine 
 is made to tell her adventures in an autobiographic 
 narrative ; and as this would not suffice, under the 
 conditions of a mortal existence limited to one spot 
 in space at a time, for the endless array of persons 
 who have to talk and be funny and interesting, the 
 writer intercalates chapters in his own person, a 
 mixture which has the awkwardest effect, and is 
 left in its natural awkwardness with no appliances 
 of literary skill to help it out. 
 
 The result of all this is, that Bleak House would 
 be a heavy book to read through at once, as a pro- 
 perly constructed novel ought to be read. But 
 we must plead guilty to having found it dull and 
 wearisome as a serial, though certainly not from its 
 want of cleverness or point. On the contrary, almost 
 everybody in the book is excessively funny, that is 
 not very wicked, or very miserable. Wright and 
 Keeley could act many of the characters without
 
 " BLEAK HOUSE." 295 
 
 alteration of a word ; Skimpole must "be constructed 
 with an especial eye to the genius of Mr. Charles 
 Matthews ; 0. Smith will of course choose Krook 
 or the sullen bricklayer, but probably the former, 
 for his effective make-up, and the grand finale by 
 spontaneous combustion, which, however Nature 
 and Mr. Lewes may deride in the pride of intellect, 
 the resources of the Adelphi will unquestionably prove 
 possible: the other characters of the piece would 
 be without difficulty distributed among ladies and 
 gentlemen familiar to the London boards. By all 
 which is implied, that Mr. Dickens selects in his por- 
 traiture exactly what a farce-writer of equal ability 
 and invention would select, that which is coarsely 
 marked and apprehended at first sight; that which 
 is purely outward and no way significant of the man, 
 an oddity of feature, a trick of gesture or of phrase, 
 something which an actor can adequately present and 
 in his presentation exhaust the conception. And 
 this tendency to a theatrical method shows itself 
 again in the exaggerated form which his satire as- 
 sumes, and which even when the satire is well 
 directed robs it of its wholesome effect. The theatre 
 is obliged to drive its points home, or they would 
 be lost; the majority of our actors want skill to 
 present a character coloured and drawn true to nature,
 
 296 ESSAYS. 
 
 and a London mixed audience would not appreciate 
 the exquisite art that disdained coarse exaggeration. 
 But the gross caricature of the stage is unbearable 
 in the study : we read with some other purpose than 
 to laugh; and if the Harold Skimpoles and Mrs. 
 Jellybys of the novel are supremely ridiculous, we 
 only refer to their counterparts in real life to note 
 that the artist has failed in his execution, and has 
 yet to learn by a deeper study of Nature how 
 cunningly she blends motives, and how seldom men 
 and women are entirely absurd or selfish without 
 a glimmering and uneasy consciousness that all is 
 not quite as it should be. 
 
 The love of strong effect, and the habit of seizing 
 peculiarities and presenting them instead of cha- 
 racters, pervade Mr. Dickens' s gravest and most 
 amiable portraits, as well as those expressly intended 
 to be ridiculous and grotesque. His heroine in Bleak 
 House is a model of unconscious goodness ; sowing 
 love and reaping it wherever she goes, diffusing 
 round her an atmosphere of happiness and a sweet 
 perfume of a pure and kindly nature. Her un- 
 consciousness and sweet humility of disposition are 
 so profound that scarcely a page of her autobiography 
 is free from a record of these admirable qualities. 
 With delightful naivete she writes down the praises
 
 " BLEAK SO USE." 297 
 
 that are showered upon her on all hands ; and it is 
 impossible to doubt the simplicity of her nature, 
 because she never omits to assert it with emphasis. 
 This is not only coarse portraiture, but utterly untrue 
 and inconsistent. Such a girl would not write her 
 own memoirs, and certainly would not bore one with 
 her goodness till a wicked wish arises that she would 
 either do something very " spicey," or confine herself 
 to superintending the jam-pots at Bleak House. Old 
 Jarndyce himself, too, is so dreadfully amiable and 
 supernaturally benevolent, that it has been a common 
 opinion during the progress of the book, that he 
 would turn out as great a rascal as Skimpole; and 
 the fox on the symbolical cover with his nose turned 
 to the East wind has been conjectured by subtle 
 intellects to be intended for his double. We rejoice 
 to find that those misanthropical anticipations were 
 unfounded ; but there must have been something false 
 to general nature in the portrait that suggested them 
 some observed peculiarity of an individual pre- 
 sented too exclusively, or an abstract conception of 
 gentleness and forbearance worked out to form a 
 sharp contrast to the loud, self-assertive, vehement, 
 but generous and tender Boythorne. This gentleman 
 is one of the most original and happiest conceptions 
 of the book, a humourist study of the highest merit.
 
 298 USSAYS. 
 
 Mr. Tulkinghorn, the Dedlock confidential solicitor, 
 is an admirable study of mere outward characteristics 
 of a class; but his motives and character are quite 
 incomprehensible, and we strongly suspect that Mr. 
 Dickens had him shot out of the way as the only 
 possible method of avoiding an enigma of his own 
 setting which he could not solve. Tulkinghorn's 
 fate excites precisely the same emotion as the death 
 of a noxious brute. He is a capital instance of an 
 old trick of Mr. Dickens, by which the supposed 
 tendencies and influences of a trade or profession are 
 made incarnate in a man, and not only is " the dyer's 
 hand subdued to what it works in," but the dyer is 
 altogether eliminated, and his powers of motion, his 
 shape, speech, and bodily functions, are translated 
 into the dye-tub. This gives the effect of what some 
 critics call marvellous individuality. It gives dis- 
 tinctness at any rate, and is telling; though it may 
 be questionable whether it is not a more fatal mistake 
 in art than the careless and unobservant habit which 
 many writers have of omitting to mark the effect of 
 occupations upon the development and exhibition of 
 the universal passions and affections. Conversation 
 Kenge and Vholes, solicitors in the great Jarndyce 
 case, have each their little characteristic set of phrases, 
 and are well-marked specimens of the genus lawyer ;
 
 " BL EAK HO USE." 299 
 
 but as they only appear in their professional capacity, 
 we are not entitled to question them as to their 
 qualities as men. 
 
 The allied families of Jellyby and Turveydrop 
 are in Dickens's happiest vein, though Mrs. Jellyby 
 is a coarse exaggeration of an existing folly. They 
 may, we think, stand beside the Micawbers. Mrs. 
 Jellyby's daughter Caddy is the only female in the 
 book we thoroughly relish: there is a blending of 
 pathos and fun in the description of her under the 
 tyranny of Borrioboola Gha, that is irresistible ; and 
 her rapid transformation from a sulky, morose, over- 
 grown child, to a graceful and amiable young woman, 
 under the genial influence of Esther Summerson, is 
 quite Cinderella-like, and as charming as any fairy 
 tale. Inspector Bucket, of the Detective Force, bears 
 evidence of the careful study of this admirable de- 
 partment of our Police by the editor of Household 
 Words; and, as in the case of Kenge and Vholes, 
 the professional capacity is here the object, and we 
 do not require a portraiture of the man and his 
 affections. Poor Joe, the street-sweeping urchin, is 
 drawn with a skill that is never more effectively 
 exercised than when the outcasts of humanity are 
 its subjects; a skill which seems to depart in pro- 
 portion as the author rises in the scale of society
 
 300 ESSAYS. 
 
 depicted. Dickens has never yet succeeded in catch- 
 ing a tolerable likeness of man or woman whose lot 
 is cast among the high-born and wealthy. Whether 
 it is that the lives of such present less that is out- 
 wardly funny or grotesque, less that strikes the eye 
 of a man on the look-out for oddity and point, or 
 that he knows nothing of their lives, certain it is that 
 his people of station are the vilest daubs ; and Sir 
 Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, with his wife and family 
 circle, are no exceptions. 
 
 If Mr. Dickens were now for the first time before 
 the public, we should have found our space fully 
 occupied in drawing attention to his wit, his in- 
 vention, his eye for common life, for common men 
 and women, for the everyday aspect of streets and 
 houses, his tendency to delineate the affections and 
 the humours rather than the passions of mankind ; 
 and his defects would have served but to shade and 
 modify the praises that flow forth willingly at the 
 appearance among us of a true and original genius. 
 And had his genius gone on growing and maturing, 
 clearing itself of extravagance, acquiring art by study 
 and reflection, it would not be easy to limit the 
 admiration and homage he might by this time have 
 won from his countrymen. As it is, he must be 
 content with the praise of amusing the idle hours
 
 " BLEAK HO USE." 301 
 
 of the greatest number of readers ; not, we may hope, 
 without improvement to their hearts, but certainly 
 without profoundly affecting their intellects or deeply 
 stirring their emotions. Clever he undoubtedly is: 
 many of his portraits excite pity, and suggest the 
 existence of crying social sins ; but of almost all we 
 are obliged to say that they border on and frequently 
 reach caricature, of which the essence is to catch 
 a striking likeness by exclusively selecting and ex- 
 aggerating a peculiarity that marks the man but does 
 not represent him. Dickens belongs in literature to 
 the same class as his illustrator, Hablot Browne, in 
 design, though he far surpasses the illustrator in range 
 and power. 
 
 The Spectator, 
 
 Sept. 24<A, 1853.
 
 302 ESSAYS. 
 
 KINGSLEY'S " WESTWARD HO!" 
 
 Mr. KINGSLEY has secured the first requisite of 
 success as a novelist, by choosing an interesting sub- 
 ject, which both excites and justifies the powers of 
 art and genius expended upon it. If it has been 
 at times necessary to protest against the application 
 of the principle of "cui bono" to works of art, it 
 has been because the application has been improperly 
 made, the principle wrongly or narrowly interpreted, 
 not because art is exempt from the necessity of 
 being available for something higher than the pastime 
 of inactive minds and jaded energies. To make us 
 wiser and larger-hearted to conduct us through a 
 wider range of experience than the actual life of 
 each generally permits to make us live in the lives 
 of other types of character than our own, or than 
 those of our daily acquaintance to enable us to pass 
 by sympathy into other minds and other circum-
 
 " WESTWARD HO !" 303 
 
 stances, and especially to train the moral nature by 
 sympathy with noble characters and noble actions, 
 these are the high aims of fiction in the hands of 
 its master wielders ; these are the aims which have 
 raised novels and dramas to an importance which 
 Nature herself indicates in assigning to their pro- 
 duction those powers which the consent of all ages 
 allows to rank supreme among the gifts of the human 
 race. 
 
 Mr. Kingsley's object is to paint the types of 
 character, and the sort of training, by which Eng- 
 land rose in the reign of Queen Elizabeth to be 
 mistress of the seas, and a model to all Europe of 
 material prosperity and national unity a powerful, 
 a wealthy, a free, and a happy people. He does 
 not, of course, attempt any such absurd impossibility 
 as to epitomize in the fortunes and career of a single 
 man or family the infinitely complex elements and 
 agencies that go to make up the life of a nation 
 at any one time ; nor does he select the central 
 Government, with its Court, its Administration, and 
 its Parliament, and write a political novel to illustrate 
 the policy of Elizabeth, and the various wisdom and 
 talent of her Ministers, with the hearty yet perfectly 
 independent action of the national assembly. He 
 takes as his type of Elizabethan character and ac-
 
 304 ESSAYS. 
 
 tivity a Devonshire youth, of good birth, and in no 
 way distinguished from other sons of country gentle- 
 men by either fortune, or learning, or genius, but of 
 great bodily strength, of lively affections and sweet 
 temper, combined with a marked propensity to combat 
 from his earliest years ; a character that when trained 
 to self-denial and a high sense of duty to God and 
 his country, and practised in the arts of war and 
 seamanship, presents perhaps as perfect a specimen 
 of glorious manhood as men have ever obeyed with 
 implicit confidence and women worshipped as their 
 natural liege lord and defender. Beside Amyas 
 Leigh stand grouped his brother Frank, charmingly 
 contrasted with him in all points except his pure 
 and warm affections and chivalrous honour ; and 
 his mother, a saintly lady, whom early experience 
 of calamity has sobered down to perfect serenity, 
 and whom later sorrow and bereavement transfigure 
 to almost unearthly intensity of faith, love, and re- 
 signation. The worthies of Devon Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville, Admirals Hawkins 
 and Sir Francis Drake ; families whose names are 
 still the bright stars of the West Fortescues, Chi- 
 chesters, Carys blend in the action and interest of 
 the scene. Burghers of Bideford, plotting Jesuits, 
 Romanist country families, mariners who have sailed
 
 " WESTWARD HO !" 305 
 
 round the world with Drake, mariners who have seen 
 Columbus and Cabot and Vasco de Gama, country- 
 parsons, gentlemen adventurers, Spanish dons, South 
 American Indians, and victims of the Inquisition, 
 crowd the story with variety of character and in- 
 cident. The scene itself spreads out from Bideford, 
 near which is the family seat of the Leighs, through 
 North and South Devon, to London in a passing 
 glance; to Ireland and its wars, in which Amyas 
 takes a distinguished part ; to the Spanish main, and 
 the boundless South American continent, where in- 
 deed the most interesting part of the adventures 
 take place; back again to Bideford, and Plymouth; 
 whence Amyas sails in command of his ship, to 
 take part in that most memorable sea-fight the 
 twelve-days battle, in which the Spanish Armada 
 was chased from Plymouth round the South and East 
 coasts of England, and finally broke, fled, or went to 
 the bottom, some escaping to Norway, a few under 
 Medina-Sidonia back to Spain; and England was 
 saved, and the long dream of Spanish ambition 
 and Popish vengeance dispelled for ever. Through 
 all this variety of incident and character Mr. Kingsley 
 never flags, never becomes wearisome. His men and 
 women live in his pages, talk life and not book ; 
 and our sympathies move with them, so that, as 
 
 x
 
 306 ESSJYS. 
 
 in life, we do not impatiently look for the issue, but 
 take an ever new interest in the details of the pro- 
 gress towards the issue. There may be differences 
 of opinion as to the estimate Mr. Kingsley has 
 formed of particular men of the age ; there certainly 
 will be opposition elicited by some of his opinions on 
 the religious manifestations of that age ; Papist and 
 Puritan will scoff almost alike at his estimate of the 
 Church-of-Englandism of that day ; and while the 
 Dissenter of today has little reason to quarrel with 
 the novelist for embodying Elizabethan Puritanism 
 in such a stern warrior, admirable seaman and gunner, 
 true comrade, Spaniard-hating and God-fearing Eng- 
 lishman, as Salvation Yeo of Clovelly, we are not 
 disposed to accept Mr. Kingsley's types as expressive 
 of any but one and that the worst form of Romanism 
 in the age he depicts. But this is not so much un- 
 fairness on his part, as a necessity of his story, 
 which leads him to deal with plotting Jesuits, semi- 
 nary priests, and Spanish American bishops and 
 inquisitors, rather than with the body of English 
 Catholic gentry, to whose loyalty he bears high and 
 notoriously well-deserved testimony. Still, the re- 
 sult is a somewhat jarring sense of a partial repre- 
 sentation in this respect, which we wish the con- 
 structive skill of the writer had been employed to
 
 " WESTWAED HO .'" 307 
 
 obviate; though we would not, for any breadth of 
 charity or comprehensive philosophy, lose or weaken 
 the intensity of his conviction that the Protestant 
 cause in that day was the cause of God, of freedom, 
 of English nationality, of American United States, 
 and of all which has made Europe different from 
 what it would have become had the Spanish dream of 
 universal empire and the destruction of Protestantism 
 been realized. It was this conviction that was at 
 the root of the heroism of our land in that day, and 
 it is the reflective glow of this conviction that gives 
 its spirit-stirring trumpet tone to Mr. Kingsley's re- 
 presentation of that heroism. 
 
 We began by -saying that Mr. Kingsley had 
 chosen his theme well, because of its interest at any 
 time to us Englishmen, descendants of the heroes of 
 the Armada. But just now it seems especially op- 
 portune that we should look back for practical lessons, 
 for encouragement, direction, and warning, to an age 
 when great actions seemed the spontaneous instinct 
 of the community, and success rose to the amplest 
 range of aspiration. If miracles were wrought then, 
 they were wrought by men using human means, 
 under that agency which will always work miracles 
 under the inspiration of a faith in righteousness 
 being the law and order of the world of a manful 
 X2
 
 308 ESSAYS. 
 
 resolution to dare everything for the right of a 
 prudence to judge of means of a gallant spirit to 
 hold life and labour and pain all well spent in the 
 service of their country, and in the cause of God, 
 freedom, and human happiness. The same spirit, 
 employing means and mechanical skill of which 
 Elizabeth's heroes never dreamed in their wildest 
 aspirations, will again produce proportionate results. 
 But we talk of righteousness and faith in God, and 
 believe in mechanical forces calculable by measure- 
 ment and arithmetic; we talk of genius and strong 
 will, and believe in routine and a system of mutual 
 check; we believe in these, or rather we have no 
 belief in anything, and this is the expression of our 
 unbelief, our incapacity, our helplessness, our despair. 
 Welcome war, welcome pestilence, welcome anything 
 that will rouse the once noble English nation from 
 this paralysis of true human, true national life ; that 
 will force us once more to seek out clear heads and 
 brave hearts, and thank God, as for His choicest gifts, 
 for men who will work themselves, and govern us 
 and teach us to work for men like those worthies 
 "whom," as Mr. Kingsley says in a hearty dedi- 
 cation of his book to the Bishop of New Zealand and 
 Rajah Sir James Brooke, "Elizabeth, without dis- 
 tinction of rank or age, gathered round her in the 
 ever-glorious wars of her great reign."
 
 WESTWARD HO!" 309 
 
 Westward Ho f partakes much more of the cha- 
 racter of biography and history than of the ordinary 
 sentimental novel. Love plays a great part in the 
 progress of the story, as it does in the lives of most 
 men; but it is as motive influencing character and 
 determining action that it is exhibited, not as itself 
 the sole interest of life, the single feeling which 
 redeems human existence from dulness and inward 
 death. The love which acts on the career and 
 character of Amyas Leigh does not spend itself in 
 moonlight monologues or in passionate discourses with 
 its object; nor does the story depend for its interest 
 upon the easily roused sympathy of even the stupidest 
 readers with the ups and downs, the fortunes and 
 emotions, of a passion common in certain degrees 
 and certain kinds to all the race. It is no such 
 narrow view of life that is presented here, but rather 
 that broad sympathy with human action and human 
 feeling in its manifold completeness which gives to 
 art a range as wide as life itself, and throws a con- 
 secrating beauty over existence from the cradle to 
 the grave, wherever human affections act, wherever 
 human energies find their object and their field, 
 wherever the battle between right and wrong, between 
 sense and spirit, is waged wherever and by what- 
 ever means characters are trained, principles strength-
 
 310 ASSAYS. 
 
 ened, and humanity developed. And this compre- 
 hensive character displaying itself in assigning its 
 true relative value to each thing we take to be the 
 distinguishing test of high art, and that which marks 
 it out from all mere sentimentalism, prettiness, 
 eclecticism, or whatever other name we may give to 
 man's attempts to reduce nature to some standard 
 of his own taste, or the taste of a particular age or 
 clique, instead of endeavouring to enlarge his heart 
 and open his eyes to see and feel the wonders and 
 the splendours which are poured down from heaven 
 on earth, in the least of which as in the greatest the 
 Infinite reveals Himself for those who through the 
 letter can penetrate to the spirit. 
 
 The Spectator, 
 
 March 17, 1855.
 
 " NOCTES AMBROSIAN&." 311 
 
 WILSON'S "NOCTES AMBROSIAN^E." 
 
 MANY of the causes which contributed to the interest 
 excited by the Nodes Ambrosiance, on their first 
 appearance in successive numbers of Blackwood's 
 Magazine, have ceased to operate. Political measures 
 round which parties were then struggling with fierce 
 passion and loud mutual denunciation have been 
 built as firmly into the constitution as Magna Charta 
 itself. The men engaged in those conflicts have 
 become historical personages, or have fallen into utter 
 oblivion; in either case escaping from the partial 
 judgments of that time, and no longer lending a charm 
 not its own to panegyric or invective. So, too, the 
 literary celebrities of that day have either attained 
 a fixed rank or been forgotten ; we no longer interest 
 ourselves in disputes about their claims. And in the 
 case of both political and literary personages, what 
 was then fresh and piquant personality has become
 
 312 ASSAYS. 
 
 familiar history or stale gossip ; pointed allusions 
 have lost their force, half-revelations have been 
 superseded ; and we wonder, as we read, at the 
 amount of feeling exhibited towards men and women 
 who are now, for the most part, shadowy names, with 
 scarce an association connecting .them with our living 
 sympathies. Yet, in spite of this inevitable effect 
 of the lapse of twenty or thirty years upon papers 
 discussing so largely topics and people of temporary 
 interest, such is the high quality of the genius 
 lavished upon them, that the public will read by far 
 the larger portion of the Noctes with as much delight 
 as at first. They appear now with a claim to rank 
 as English classics as the choicest production of 
 their author, one of the most highly endowed men 
 of his time. Their chief interlocutor, the eidolon of 
 the Ettrick Shepherd, is ranked by Professor Wilson's 
 admirers with the most forcible characters known to 
 us through history or created by fiction. Thus, Pro- 
 fessor Terrier, introducing the Noctes with a preface, 
 says " In wisdom, the Shepherd equals the Socrates 
 of Plato; in humour, he surpasses the Falstaff of 
 Shakspere; clear and prompt, he might have stood 
 up against Dr. Johnson in close and peremptory 
 argument ; fertile and copious, he might have rivalled 
 Burke in amplitude of declamation." Socrates, Fal-
 
 "NOCTES AMBEOSIAN^l." 313 
 
 staff, Dr. Johnson, and Burke, all in one ! and that 
 one talking a broad Doric, that seems to an English 
 ear the native dialect of humour, plastic alike to 
 pathos, fun, and homely shrewdness ; a shepherd, too, 
 knowing all the shy charms of nature in remotest 
 haunts of solitude and silence all the racy cha- 
 racteristics of pastoral life and pastoral people, their 
 joys, their sorrows, their pleasures, and their business. 
 Estimated thus, the Shepherd of the Nodes would 
 really be the most marvellous of the creations of that 
 literature which stands highest among the literatures 
 of Europe for its presentation of human character. 
 And, with some qualification, the estimate is not so 
 absurd as at first sight our habitual reverence for 
 such names as Professor Ferrier has brought into his 
 comparison would consider it. 
 
 The truth is, that Wilson, one of the most re- 
 markable men that ever lived for the variety and 
 strength of his powers, has thrown into the Shep- 
 herd's talk the teeming activity of his own mind and 
 heart ; and so far as characters are displayed in life, 
 and in that fiction which reflects life, solely by their 
 desultory talk, the Shepherd may fairly be matched 
 with any one. If it was simply as a shrewd talker 
 that we knew Socrates if Falstaff was to us simply 
 a sayer of good things, Dr. Johnson a hard hitter
 
 314 E88AY8. 
 
 in argument, Burke a copious and splendid declaimer 
 Wilson's Shepherd might without exaggeration be 
 put upon a level with all these remarkable characters. 
 He talks as shrewdly as Socrates, as wittily as 
 Falstaff, as weightily as Johnson, as splendidly as 
 Burke; or, at least, the exaggeration of such as- 
 sertions might pass without challenge. He does talk 
 more shrewdly, wittily, weightily, and splendidly, 
 than any man we have the pleasure of knowing. 
 But the talk of these famous personages is all related 
 to action or serious discussion is the genuine utter- 
 ance of the men in contact with facts, either engaged 
 in the business of life or in the pursuit of truth. 
 Something more is revealed by it than a kaleidoscope 
 quickness and variety of intellect ; it displays at once 
 and subserves the will and the affections. Socrates 
 talks cleverly, and gets his opponent generally into 
 chancery a feat which would raise him to the rank 
 of a first-rate sophist; but we value him for his 
 genuine earnestness in pursuit of truth, his plainness, 
 his fearlessness, his candour, his pure and aspiring 
 soul dialectic is simply his instrument. Falstaff is 
 witty, but not wittier than Sheridan or Hook : what 
 we admire in him is the profound sincerity of his 
 sensual abasement -the devotion of the whole man, 
 wit, understanding, reason, conscience, to the pleasures
 
 "NOCTHS AMBROSIAN^." 315 
 
 of the animal man his utter insensibility to the 
 higher claims and enjoyments of his humanity ; it is 
 a character, not a talker, that delights us in the fat 
 knight. So in Johnson, and Burke, the talk is 
 merely instrumental, symptomatic of a whole man 
 talking. But in the Shepherd of the Nodes the talk 
 is the be-all and the end-all ; the man is a talker 
 and little else ; and we identify him with his talk 
 almost as little as we do an actor with his part. 
 This is partly owing to the form adopted : desultory 
 talk u de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis" can 
 never thoroughly develop a character can do nothing 
 but show a man's versatility of intellect and command 
 of language. But it is also owing to the fact that 
 one of the Shepherd's traits is the queerest and most 
 grotesque vanity almost the only trait borrowed 
 from the original model ; and that he is throughout 
 represented as talking for effect, to show off his 
 eloquence. We have not, consequently, a character 
 completely developed, but merely a man who can 
 assume all characters for the nonce; can be funny, 
 pathetic, wise, descriptive, poetical, or sensual, just 
 as the play requires. And he is so palpably acting 
 that he tires us by his cleverness of assumption, just 
 as a hired mountebank would tire us by insisting on 
 showing off his powers of mimicry in conversation.
 
 316 US SAYS. 
 
 Another objection to the Nodes as a whole may 
 be conveyed in the words of Mr. Foster, who, in his 
 admirable life of Goldsmith, says "Of the many 
 clever and indeed wonderful writings that from age 
 to age are poured forth into the world, what is it that 
 puts upon the few the stamp of immortality, and 
 makes them seem indestructible as nature ? what is 
 it but their wise rejection of everything superfluous ?" 
 We estimate works of art, as we estimate characters 
 in life, more by their unity and completeness than 
 by their richness and profusion of raw material. It 
 is coherence, order, purpose, which make the differ- 
 ence between Nature and Chaos. And if all the wit, 
 the wisdom, the geniality, and the imagination of the 
 Noctes Ambrosiance fail to secure them a place among 
 English classics, it will be because these are reduced 
 to no order, subordinated to no general purpose, 
 organized into no whole. They will even then re- 
 main the very best magazine papers that were 
 probably ever written. 
 
 The Spectator, 
 
 November 24, 1855."
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 317 
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 THE "Cours de Philosophic Positive" is at once 
 a compendious cyclopaedia of science and an exhi- 
 bition of scientific method. It defines rigorously 
 the characteristics of the several orders of phenomena 
 with which the particular sciences are concerned, 
 arranges them in an ascending scale of complexity 
 and specialty beginning with mathematics and ending 
 with social physics or sociology, and assigns to each 
 science its proper method in accordance with the 
 nature of the phenomena to be investigated. The 
 connexion between the sciences thus arranged is, that 
 the laws of each preceding order of phenomena are 
 operative in that which succeeds, but in combination 
 with a new order of laws, the study of which con- 
 stitutes the advanced science. As might be supposed, 
 the sciences have historically developed themselves 
 in accordance with this arrangement, the simpler and
 
 318 ESSAYS. 
 
 more general first, the more complex and special 
 afterwards. Thus we obtain not only a lucid and 
 rational classification, but a logical genealogy and 
 an historical law of evolution, forming a sure basis 
 for education and a luminous indication of future 
 progress. An arrangement so simple in its principle, 
 so fruitful in its results, one may well be astonished 
 at having had so many ages to wait for. It is, how- 
 ever, unquestionable that, though half-formed sug- 
 gestions of such a classification are here and there 
 to be found, and though Hegel in particular, pro- 
 ceeding on a totally different method, has reached an 
 arrangement that superficially resembles M. Comte's, 
 yet to the latter belongs the honour of having 
 thoroughly worked out the conception, of having 
 rigorously determined and decisively constituted the 
 filiation, of having exhibited the relations between 
 phenomena and method, and finally of having ac- 
 curately conceived and initiated the crowning science 
 of sociology, with its two departments of social statics 
 and social dynamics, dealing the one with the con- 
 ditions of the stability of human societies, the other 
 with the laws of their progress. Because it is not 
 merely a cyclopsedia of scientific facts, but an exhi- 
 bition of the methods of human knowledge and of the 
 relations between its different branches, M. Comte
 
 COM TE 'S POSITIVE PHIL SOPHY. 319 
 
 calls his work philosophy ; and because it limits itself 
 to what can be proved, he terms it positive philosophy. 
 That, during the twenty years since the appear- 
 ance of the first volume of the original work, it has 
 powerfully influenced the thoughts and writings of 
 the most exact minds engaged in speculation in this 
 country, will be doubtful to no one who compares 
 the books published on the general principles and 
 mutual relations of science before and since its ap- 
 pearance. That it has given a far more special and 
 directing impulse to those writers than most of them 
 have been or would be willing publicly to avow, 
 is Miss Martineau's opinion, and one of her motives 
 a highly honourable one for presenting a trans- 
 lation of the original work to the English public. 
 The motive assigned by Miss Martineau for this 
 assumed reluctance to credit Comte with his due 
 share of influence, is one likely enough to have pre- 
 vailed with all English writers who were not very 
 far above the common level in moral courage, or very 
 far below it in insolent bravado and conceited con- 
 tempt for the opinions and sympathies of their 
 countrymen. For M. Comte's book, besides being, 
 as we have described it, a treatise on science and 
 scientific methods, is also a fierce polemic against 
 theology and metaphysics, with all the notions and
 
 320 ESSAYS. 
 
 sentiments that have their roots in them, all the 
 "beliefs and hopes which are considered, among us, if 
 not the foundations, at least indispensable supports 
 of morality. M. Comte scornfully denounces theism 
 and atheism as equally unwarrantable intrusions into 
 a province beyond the faculties, and barren for the 
 needs of man ; he treats our hope of a life beyond the 
 grave as a childish chimera; mind he scouts as a 
 metaphysical entity, on a level with the "occult 
 causes " of the schoolmen ; Him whom other men 
 worship as the source and sustainer of their own lives, 
 and of all the powers at work around them, he treats 
 as a poor old dethroned Fetish a roi faineant, kept 
 up, like the descendant of the Great Mogul, from 
 unmeaning habit of accustomed reverence, or the idle 
 prejudices and selfish interests of metaphysicians and 
 theologians a useless ceremonial, from which all 
 power has been transferred to positive laws, and all 
 glory to their discoverers. In the universe of man 
 and the worlds he resolves to see only a vast con- 
 sensus of forces, an infinite whirl and rush of phe- 
 nomena, of which we can learn by observation the 
 uniform coexistences and sequences, but know not, 
 nor need to know, whence they flashed into being, 
 what power sustains them, or what their mighty 
 movements mean. What appears, we may and
 
 COMTH'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 321 
 
 should investigate to what is, we have no access, no 
 ascertainable relation. M. Comte aims, in fact, not 
 simply at renovating science by reforming its general 
 conceptions and completing its range, but at rigidly 
 limiting human beliefs and speculations, and on the 
 basis of demonstrable knowledge of phenomena con- 
 stituting a reformed order of practical life and society. 
 It was long ago said by one of our most brilliant 
 living wits, " There is no God, and Miss Martineau 
 is his prophet"; and it therefore excites no surprise 
 that the same pretensions, which are supposed to 
 have deterred other English writers from acknow- 
 ledging their obligation to the French philosopher, 
 should have induced her to undertake the laborious 
 task of translating and condensing his six bulky 
 volumes into two. She sees in his strict limitation 
 of the human faculties to phenomenal knowledge 
 in his treatment of all that cannot be demonstrated 
 by sensible experience as chimeras a means not 
 otherwise procurable of remedying the intellectual 
 anarchy of her country, of reinstating firm beliefs 
 and impregnable principles in religion, morals, and 
 politics, and so putting a final check upon the spread 
 of weak and inconsistent practice, general faintness 
 of heart and uncertainty of mind. For she too thinks 
 that all the old beliefs and philosophies were but 
 
 Y
 
 322 ZSSATS. 
 
 leading-strings and baby-jumpers for our race; that 
 they have long encumbered the movements of the 
 growing boy, and must be cleared off sent abroad, 
 perhaps, for the aborigines of Australia and Terra del 
 Fuego, who have yet to pass through the phases of 
 Western Europe, though the duration of the crisis 
 may be materially abridged for them by the influence 
 of the nations which have preceded them in the course 
 of human evolution. 
 
 It is these pretensions of the positive philosophy 
 with which alone we profess to deal, because it is of 
 these alone that there can be any dispute amongst 
 competent persons. If observation of phenomena is 
 our sole source of knowledge, no one questions but 
 that the " inductive canons " are the guides to ac- 
 curate observation and the rules of safe generalization. 
 The assumption is, however, somewhat extensive; 
 and M. Comte nowhere attempts to demonstrate 
 this fundamental position of his system, unless it 
 is demonstration to assert that theology and me- 
 taphysics have been barren speculations, whereas 
 positive science has gone on from age to age extend- 
 ing its domain and adding to men's practical and 
 demonstrable knowledge. This, however, our space 
 will not allow us to discuss. Nor can we do more 
 even with respect to these pretensions than to speak
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 323 
 
 of some preliminary considerations which lie in the 
 way of their admission. As a series of treatises on 
 the various sciences, M. Comte's work might be full 
 of errors of detail without much impairing its value 
 as a philosophic classification ; and in fact, with respect 
 to all but the simple sciences, even if it had been 
 without blemish at the time of its publication, years 
 are so rapidly developing our knowledge that it could 
 have retained its perfection only a short time. As 
 a treatise on method, it falls so far short of Mr. J. S. 
 Mill's Logic in exhaustive treatment and in clear 
 terse style, and has besides been so ably criticised 
 by him in various parts of that admirable work, that 
 it is superfluous to point out its special defects to 
 the English student of philosophy. In spite of an- 
 tiquated details and of special defects, however, the 
 work will always retain a most distinguished place 
 in the history of opinion ; and to it must the student 
 resort who shall hereafter wish to see the form which 
 the science of social physics acquired in the hands 
 of its first rigorously positive investigator. We have 
 simply to inquire what its great claims are to supply 
 the place of those theological and metaphysical beliefs 
 and sentiments which it proposes to supersede what 
 support it can lend to moral principles and noble 
 T2
 
 324 ESSAYS. 
 
 conduct, equivalent to the aids of which it would 
 deprive us. 
 
 It is not unlikely that a preliminary objection 
 would ordinarily "be taken against the pretensions of 
 positivism to exclude all other motives to action, and 
 other grounds of assurance, in the fact that except 
 for the simpler sciences, from geometry to chemistry 
 physiology rapidly advancing to meet them it is 
 as yet in its infancy, and has no body of doctrine 
 to substitute for what it displaces. A positivist 
 would answer to this, that conscious ignorance is 
 better than chimerical fancies, which not only them- 
 selves mislead, but prevent the growth of true 
 doctrine ; that we are possessed of empirical laws as 
 to physical life, individual conduct, and social organ- 
 ization, by which to direct experiments and guide 
 practice with more or less approximation to truth; 
 and that, scientific conceptions and scientific methods 
 once instituted, a body of doctrine will accumulate 
 with a rapidly accelerating ratio. A more funda- 
 mental objection is, that after leaving physiology, we 
 get into a region of phenomena where Will plays a 
 leading part, and, quite apart from all consideration 
 of theistic interference, introduces a disturbing element 
 that baffles the previsions of science by destroying 
 the uniformity in the connexion of the phenomena
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 325 
 
 of conduct. Whatever theory, however, be held 
 about the human will, whatever phrases be preferred 
 to express our consciousness of its mode of operation, 
 it is undeniable that an act of determination is uni- 
 formly preceded by a predominant desire in con- 
 formity with that act. The question therefore really 
 is, can the succession of our desires be reduced to 
 uniform laws ? Given the character and the circum- 
 stances of a man, is it possible to determine what 
 desires will direct his action ? The popular, or rather 
 the metaphysical voice, denies this possibility; but, 
 we think, more in the interest of certain other theories 
 such for instance as human responsibility than 
 because facts compel this denial. For if this de- 
 termination of human actions be really impossible 
 under the assumed conditions, in other words, if 
 human actions are capricious and arbitrary in any 
 other sense than arises from the complexity and in- 
 calculable nature of the motives which determine 
 them, what is the meaning of education, of moral 
 and social influences, of any legislation but what is 
 penal, or indeed even of penal legislation ? Plainly, 
 all these agencies rest for their validity upon the 
 commonly-believed fact that motives influence con- 
 duct; that one train of motives ever acting upon a 
 human being of given tendencies induces conduct
 
 326 ESSAYS. 
 
 different from another train of motives. Religion 
 itself, what is it but a fresh and higher presentation 
 of motives truths revealed to influence human con- 
 duct, which other known truths are not capable of 
 influencing in the same direction to the same degree ? 
 It is true that nothing appears at first sight more 
 variable, more capricious, less subject to any uni- 
 formities of sequence, than the phenomena of human 
 conduct : but then, it is to be remembered that the 
 determining conditions of human conduct are in- 
 finitely various and complex. For this reason, Mr. 
 Mill has carefully guarded against the extravagant 
 supposition that the future acts of men and of societies 
 can, in the highest possibilities of social science, 
 be foreseen like the phenomena of the heavenly 
 bodies ; and has limited the utmost attainment of 
 that science to determine that given circumstances 
 have a tendency to alter given characters in ascer- 
 tainable degrees and directions, or that under given 
 circumstances given characters will act in a deter- 
 minate manner. Nor has M. Comte carried his 
 speculations to a more extravagant pitch than 
 this ; which seems, after all said, to be nothing 
 more than the enunciation with scientific precision 
 of a belief we all act upon every day of our lives, 
 and on which most of the institutions of society
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 327 
 
 t. e. all which have a moral or educational aim are 
 founded. 
 
 Putting aside, then, these two objections, which 
 lie, the one against the present claims, the other 
 against the possibility, of social science, and sup- 
 posing such a science not only to the extent indi- 
 cated possible, not only constituted in conception and 
 method, but so far constructed as that the tendencies 
 of men and of societies under given circumstances 
 shall be rigorously demonstrated, our inquiry is, 
 whether such knowledge is adequate to supply the 
 forces necessary to maintain individuals and societies 
 in a right course of conduct. We assume the con- 
 ditions known under which the human being may 
 be trained to any given line of conduct; but how 
 do we determine the line of conduct to be enforced 
 on men and on societies ? The phenomena of human 
 action being, in virtue of their complexity, eminently 
 modifiable, have we from positivism any principle 
 on which to found our modifying interference, any 
 end by which to shape our education, our social or- 
 ganization, our legislation ? Comte bases on the past 
 history of human evolution a brilliant generalization 
 of the phases of speculative opinion through which 
 mankind has passed or must pass, and indicates the 
 coexistent social and political phenomena which be-
 
 328 
 
 long to each phase. In every department of specu- 
 lation that has run its course, mankind has passed 
 through three stages, or modes of viewing the phe- 
 nomena whose explanation is sought, the theologic, 
 in which all action in the world is referred to a 
 volition in or above the objects moved; the meta- 
 physic, in which the action is referred to mysterious 
 entities supposed to reside in objects moving, and 
 which are in fact nothing but abstract conceptions 
 of the phenomena themselves ; and finally the positive, 
 in which no explanation is sought beyond the classi- 
 fication of the phenomenon along with similar phe- 
 nomena, and the ascertainment of its precedent con- 
 ditions. This bare statement can give not the faintest 
 conception of the value of the generalization if only 
 estimated as an hypothetical approximation to a true 
 law in studying universal history. But M. Comte 
 authoritatively lays it down as demonstrated to be 
 the leading law of human evolution, since all other 
 social phenomena follow its phases. If we are not 
 satisfied with his proofs, if we object that the first 
 links in the chain of evidence are altogether wanting, 
 and that the hypothesis is based upon no exhaustive 
 analysis even of the facts which history has recorded, 
 we are cavalierly informed that social science re- 
 quires the establishment of such a law, and estab-
 
 COMTJE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 329 
 
 listed therefore it is and shall "be. This law of 
 evolution being then established to M. Comte's satis- 
 faction, and for the sake of argument to ours also, 
 how does it supply the guiding principle we are 
 in quest of to regulate the future course of that 
 evolution, so far as our modifying power may ex- 
 tend? Here M. Comte becomes altogether obscure 
 and contradictory. It seems sufficient to him to 
 know the law of the phases through which belief has 
 passed in reference to certain departments of science, 
 and is, in his opinion, to pass in all branches of know- 
 ledge and speculation. The other social phenomena 
 being dependent on or at least following the changes 
 of speculative opinion, their law is known too. But 
 we are as far off as ever from any guide for indi- 
 vidual conduct, or for the action of society. It may 
 be that M. Comte thinks it superfluous, having in- 
 dicated a law of human progression, to do more than 
 hint that we are to obey it, and become positive as 
 quickly as we may ; and that this once in course of 
 accomplishment, the social movement will proceed 
 harmoniously in its normal course, bringing felicity 
 the highest attainable to individuals and to societies. 
 But even this very vague injunction, to make posi- 
 tivism our aim and guiding principle of conduct, has 
 after all not even the slight practical bearing which
 
 330 ZSSAYS. 
 
 at first sight it seems to have. For we are over and 
 over again assured by M. Comte, that the general 
 course of human evolution is beyond human control ; 
 that only secondary modifications as to speed and 
 minor indirect influences of the main movement are 
 within our power. Indeed, the whole course of his 
 demonstration from history shows this, inasmuch as 
 the evolution has proceeded into the third and final 
 stage not only without conscious effort of men so 
 to direct it, but against their continuous effort to 
 thwart it and turn it to another direction. If, then, 
 only secondary modifications and indirect fluctuations 
 and regurgitations of the main current are within 
 our influence to control and regulate, of what possible 
 use can it be to inform us only of the main law of 
 evolution, with whose course we have nothing to do but 
 to acknowledge it and submit to it ? It is just of the 
 things that are within our power that we have need to 
 know, in order to regulate our conduct. A man wish- 
 ing to build a house must indeed obey the law of uni- 
 versal gravitation, but it will help him little practically 
 to have that law enunciated with the most convincing 
 pomp of historical proof and the most rigid mathe- 
 matical precision. We are obliged to conclude, then, 
 that positivism in M. Comte's hands, while pretending 
 to take upon itself the regulation of human conduct,
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 331 
 
 fails to furnish a guiding principle for either indi- 
 viduals or societies. It sends us to sea with an 
 admirable chart of the tides, currents, and winds; 
 instructs us how eminently modifiable these forces 
 are by the rudder; but declines to provide us with 
 a compass, or to say anything about the port for 
 which we have to steer. All that can be done in 
 such a case is to lie on one's back and look at the 
 stars, or exercise an empirical prudence in selecting 
 such a course as fancy or foresight may suggest. To 
 drop metaphor, we must still have recourse to our 
 celestial guides, or to our internal monitions, in our 
 voyage along the stormy sea of life ; for M. Comte 
 provides us with no satisfactory substitute. 
 
 But morality implies not only a fixed aim, a 
 principle of action to maintain steadiness amid the 
 conflicts of contending motives; it equally demands 
 ruling influences that are adequate to maintain 
 obedience to the principle of action, persistence to- 
 wards the aim. Suppose, then, society constituted 
 on a positive basis, its principle of existence undis- 
 puted, what motives could the system present to the 
 members of society, young and old, to compel 
 obedience to its regulations? of what forces would 
 its moral police find themselves possessed? They 
 would have the advantage to begin with of a uniform
 
 332 ESSAYS. 
 
 state of belief, moulding all social influences and 
 institutions, and so by its indirect as well as direct 
 effects tending to check that intellectual discord and 
 uncertainty from which so much of our social and 
 individual weakness proceeds ; an enormous force, not 
 to be easily overestimated liable, however, we must 
 remember, to be rudely broken in upon by specu- 
 lations of a contrary character, so long as any field 
 remained open for such speculations: and to the 
 young citizens of the Positive society the Unknown 
 would still remain open, and dreams and reminis- 
 cences could scarcely fail to float in from that region, 
 and fall as fruitful seeds on spirits impatient, as 
 experience tells us human spirits ever will be, of the 
 limitations of certain knowledge. So that even for 
 positivism there is no guarantee against the inroads 
 of metaphysics and mysticism. But, be that worth 
 what it may as an argument, the direct moral force 
 of positive teaching would lie in the demonstration 
 of the issues of conduct on society at large and on 
 the individuals acting in the strength and vivacity 
 of the personal and general affections; of course, 
 rewards and punishments might be as effectual as 
 with us at present. In fact, with the exception 
 indicated above, and that only amounts to difference 
 of degree, the motives of positivism are all in force
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 333 
 
 now; and added to them are all those sentiments, 
 hopes, and fears, that spring from a belief in God 
 and a confidence of life beyond the grave. We can 
 speak of self-interest, of love of country, of attach- 
 ment to friends and relations, of the closer ties of 
 family and love between man and woman, of the 
 charms of knowledge, of the influences of art, of the 
 sympathies inspired by generous actions, as well as 
 the positivist. But we can speak too of a personal 
 Being of infinite love, purity, and power, to whom 
 we are responsible, and who we are taught to believe 
 watches our course with a tender interest, for which 
 no name is sufficiently expressive but those which 
 denote the dearest earthly relationships. We can 
 speak too of a life hereafter, and are taught to believe 
 that the formation of character is of infinite importance 
 compared with all other issues of conduct, because 
 character is eternal, and what is done and thought 
 here bears fruit of weal or wo beyond the limits of 
 time. Even these mighty moral forces are con- 
 tinually found insufficient to keep us up to our 
 imperfect sense of duty, to make us ever regard that 
 highest social law which says " Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself." What, then, has positivism 
 to offer as a corrective to selfish passions and short- 
 sighted lust of present gratification, that can do in
 
 334 'ESSAYS. 
 
 the place of these? We assumed vastly too much 
 when we conceded to this system that the affections 
 will flourish with the same vigour if the belief of 
 man's immortality is destroyed ; yet these, again, are 
 among our strongest purifying influences strongest 
 to refine, strongest to free from selfishness. So it 
 appears that this system not only fails to provide an 
 aim for the action of man and of society, but if an 
 aim were conceded to it, has no moral force to keep 
 men steady, no counteracting power to the notorious 
 selfishness and sensuality against which we have to 
 be ever on our guard. 
 
 But if all else prospered with the positive philo- 
 sophy if demonstration compelled us to admit its 
 law of historical evolution if it provided aims and 
 motives to individual or social conduct there remains 
 one objection fatal, in our opinion, to its pre- 
 sumptions. It professes the power to elevate human 
 life to heights of felicity and knowledge of which we 
 as yet only dream that it will bring round the 
 golden year for which poets have tuned their most 
 stirring songs and prophets yearned upon their watch- 
 towers : and could it perform all its votaries promise, 
 what would be the inevitable result ? Undoubtedly 
 that, the lovelier and the richer life grew the higher 
 in dignity, the firmer in purpose, the fuller of grand
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 335 
 
 results the fiercer would rise the longing for im- 
 mortality; the more would the men and women of 
 the "crowning race" shrink back appalled with 
 horror from the thought of personal annihilation. 
 By this contradiction the scheme stands condemned 
 in the moral judgment. Probably, were it to become 
 the creed of the world, it would be condemned not 
 by such contradiction, but by belying the promises 
 of its author, and by degrading and sensualizing 
 human life till man would care as little about death 
 as a dog does, or rather seek it as soon as his sensual 
 faculties were so impaired that life yielded less 
 physical pleasure than pain. If a practical test of 
 the positive creed be wanted, there is one ready at 
 hand. Let any one follow to the grave the wife, the 
 child, the parent he has loved and lost, and seek to 
 comfort himself by the reflection that the loved one 
 is absorbed in the grand dtre in the totality of or- 
 ganized life existing through all time in the universe. 
 No ! whatever speculative difficulties may beset and 
 bewilder us when intellect is busy, and feeling and 
 action suspended for a while, we shall all be glad, 
 when bereavement and sorrow cast their shadows 
 over our path, to take refuge in the faith of our child- 
 hood ; and the words of our burial-service, " Blessed 
 are the dead that die in the Lord," will fall upon
 
 336 ESSAYS. 
 
 the ear with an assurance all the more sure from the 
 doubts with which we have struggled, and the clouds 
 of speculation that have hid the great moral verities 
 for a time from our overstrained eyes. 
 
 The Spectator, 
 
 February u, 1854. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 J. PALMER, PRINTER, SIDNEY STREET, CAMBRIDGE.
 
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 "A took which I would recommend to every student." REV. PREBENDARY 
 SWAINSON, Principal of Chichester Theological College.
 
 12 NEW WORKS AND NEW EDITIONS, 
 
 BY CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.S.A, 
 
 Hector o/Eversley, and Canon of Middleham. 
 
 1 . Two Years Ago. Second Edition. 
 
 3 vols. crown 8vo. cloth, 1 11*. Qd, 
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 PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 13 
 
 BY THE RIGHT REV. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SELWYN, D.D., 
 
 Lord Bishop of New Zealand, formerly Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. 
 
 The Work of Christ in the World. Sermons Preached 
 before the University of Cambridge. Third Edition. Published 
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 Crown 8vo. 2s. 
 
 BY CHARLES HARDWICK, M.A, 
 
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 Christ and other Masters : A Historical Inquiry into 
 
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 BY CHARLES MANSFIELD, M.A, 
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 The Transportation Question ; or, Why Western 
 
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 14 NEW WORKS AND NEW EDITIONS, 
 
 BY D. J. VAUGHAN, M.A, 
 
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 " Of sterling value." LONDON QUARTERLY. 
 
 BY THE HON. HENRY E. J. HOWARD, D.D., 
 
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 The Pentateuch, or the Five Books of Moses. 
 
 Translated into English from the Version of the LXX. With 
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 BY J. T. ABDY, LL.D. 
 
 Regius Professor of Civil Law in the Univertity of Cambridge. 
 
 A Historical Sketch of Civil Procedure among the 
 
 Romans. Crown 8vo. cloth, 4:s. 6d.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 15 
 
 BY DAVID MASSON, M.A., 
 
 Professor of English Literature in University Collcye, London. 
 
 Essays, Biographical and Critical : chiefly on English 
 
 Poets. 8vo. cloth, 12s. Qd. 
 
 " Mr. Masson lias succeeded in producing a series of criticisms in relation to 
 creative literature, which are satisfactory as well as subtile, which are not only 
 ingenious, but which possess the rarer recommendation of being usually jttst . . 
 But we pass over these Essays to that which is in the main a new, and, according 
 to our judgment, an excellent biographical sketch of Chatterton. . . This ' Story 
 of the Tear 1770,' as Mr. Masson entitles it, stands for nearly 200 pages in his 
 volume, and contains, by preference, the fruits of his judgment and research in 
 an elaborated and discursive memoir. . . Its merit consists in the illustration 
 afforded by Mr. Masson's inquiries into contemporary circumstances, and the 
 clear traces thus obtained of Chattel-toil's London life -and experience. . . . 
 Mr. Masson unravels this mystery very completely" TIMES. 
 
 " No one wjio reads a single page of Mr. Masson will be likely to content himself 
 with that alone. He will see at a glance that he has come across a man endowed 
 with a real love of poetry ; a clear, fresh, happy insight into the poefs heart ; 
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 England, lie has distinct and pleasant thoughts to utter ; he is not above doing 
 his very best to utter them well ; thsre is nothing slovenly or clumsy or untidy 
 in their expression ; they leap along in a bright stream, bubbling, sparkling, and 
 transparent." THE GUARDIAN. 
 
 " Worthy of being ranked among the very foremost of their class. . . The longest 
 and finest composition of the work a gem in literary biography it its ' Chat- 
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 biography fills up this sad outline as it never was filled up before." 
 
 EDINBURGH WITJNESS (edited by Hugh Miller). 
 
 " His life of Chatterton is a complete, symmetrical and marvellous work of art 
 ... a classical biography." THE GLASGOW COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 " Will secure both attention and respect." EXAMINEE. 
 
 " Very admirable criticisms, which show not only a thorough acquaintance with 
 the works he criticises, but a deep sense of poetic beauty." DAILY ISEWS. 
 
 " We know not where to find a larger amount of discriminating, far-seeing, and 
 genial criticism within the same compass." BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW. 
 
 " Here is a biography (the essay on Chalterton) told without exaggeration, 
 without unwarranted use of hypothetic incidents, yet surpassing the most 
 highly-wrought fiction in its power over our emotions." 
 
 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 
 
 " Not only a series of biographical studies, but in some sort a philosophical history 
 of English poetry from Shakspeare to Alexander Smith." THE LEADER. 
 
 " Distinguished by a remarkable power of analysis, a clear statement of the aetval 
 facts on which sjieculatiuti is based, and an appropriate beauty of language. 
 These Essays should be popular with serious men." THE ATHENAEUM.
 
 16 NEW WORKS AND NEW EDITIONS, 
 
 THE WORKS OF 
 
 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, M.A., 
 
 Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, 
 
 Expository Works on the Holy Scripture : 
 
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 This Volume contains Discourses on The Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, 
 and the beginning of the First Book of Samuel. 
 
 2. The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament. 
 
 Second Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth, 10*. Qd. 
 
 This Volume contains Discourses on Samuel I. and II., Kings I. and II. 
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 and Ezekiel. 
 
 3. The Unity of the New Testament. 8vo. cloth, 14*. 
 
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 St. James, St. Jude, St. Peter, and St. Paul. 
 
 4. The Gospel of St. John. A Series of Discourses. 
 
 Second Edition, Crown 8vo. cloth, 10*. 6rf. 
 
 5. The Epistles of St. John. A Series of Lectures on 
 
 Christian Ethics. Crown 8vo. cloth, 7s. 6d. 
 
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 Second Edition. Fcap. Svo. cloth, 5*. 6d. 
 
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 The Doctrine of Sacrifice deduced from the Scrip- 
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 Learning and Working. The Religion of Rome, and 
 its Influence on Modern Civilization. 
 
 In 1 vol. Crown Svo. cloth, 5*.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 17 
 
 MR. MAURICE'S WORKS-continued. 
 
 Ecclesiastical History. 8vo. cloth, 10*. 6d. 
 
 Theological Essays. SECOND EDITION. Crown 8vo. 10*. &d. 
 
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 The Case of Queen's College, London, l*. Sd, 
 
 Death and Life. In Memoriam C.B.M. Is. 
 
 Administrative Reform. 3<*.
 
 NEW WORKS AND NEW EDITIONS, 
 
 Uniformly Printed and Bound, 
 NOW IN COURSE OF PUBLICATION. 
 
 It is now about five years since the Prospectus of tins Series was 
 first issued. Four volumes have now been published, and several 
 others are in an advanced state. The reception which the volumes 
 already published have met with, has fully justified the antici- 
 pation with which the - Publishers commenced the Series, and 
 warrants them in the belief, that their aim of supplying books 
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 professional Student and interesting to the general reader," has 
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 The following paragraphs appeared in the original Prospectus, and may 
 be here conveniently reproduced : 
 
 " The Authors being Clergymen of the English Church, and the Series 
 being designed primarily for the use of Candidates for office in 
 her Ministry, the books will seek to be in accordance with her 
 spirit and principles ; and as the spirit and principles of the 
 English Church teach charity and truth, 'so in treating of the 
 opinions and principles of other communions, every effort will 
 be made to avoid acrimony or misrepresentation. 
 
 " It will be the aim of the writers throughout the Series to avoid all 
 dogmatic expression of doubtful or individual opinions." 
 
 THE FOLLOWING FOUR V-OLUMES ARE NOW READY :
 
 PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 19 
 
 THEOLOGICAL MANUALS-continued. 
 
 1 . A General View of the History of the Canon of the 
 
 New Testament during the FIRST FOUR CENTURIES. 
 By BROOKE Foss WESTCOTT, M.A., Assistant Master of Harrow 
 School, formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 Crown Svo. cloth, 12*. Qd, 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 " A work which forms one of the invaluable series of Theological Manuals now in 
 course of publication at Cambridge" 
 
 BRITISH AND FOREIGN EVANGELICAL REVIEW. 
 
 " The Author is one of those who are teaching us that it is possible to rifle the 
 storehouses of German theology, without bearing away the taint of their atmo- 
 sphere : and to recognise the value of their accumulated treasures, and even 
 track the vagaries of their theoretic ingenuity, without abandoning in the pursuit 
 the clear sight and sound feeling of English common sense .... It is by far 
 the best ar.d most complete book of the kind; and we should be glad to see it 
 well placed on the lists of our examining chaplains." GUARDIAN. 
 
 " Learned, dispassionate, discriminating, worthy of his subject and the present 
 sfate of Christian Literature in relation to it." BRITISH QUARTERLY. 
 
 " To the student in Theology it will prove an admirable Text-Hook : and to all 
 others who have any curiosity on the subject it will be satisfactory as one of the 
 most useful and instructive pieces of history which the records of the Church 
 supply." LONDON QUARTERLY. 
 
 " The Author carries into the execution of his design a careful and painstaking 
 scholarship .... Considered as a list of Testimonials in favour of the canonical 
 writings, our Author's work deserves the praise of great diligence and manifest 
 conscientiousness." NATIONAL REVIEW. 
 
 " If the rest of the series of manuals, of which the present volume forms apart, are 
 as ably executed, the Christian public will be greatly indebted to the projectors 
 of the plan." LITERARY CHURCHMAN. 
 
 " There is nothing, so far as we know, resembling it in the English tongue . . . We 
 have here presented to us a striking and luminous view of a very broad and 
 comprehensive subject, marked throughout by rich and copious erudition. 
 A volume which we consider a mofl valuable addition to the literature of 
 Revelation . Scripture Expositors, of whatever name, will acknowledge that they 
 have been laid under deep obligation by the work of MR. WESTCOTT." 
 
 BRITISH BANNER. 
 
 " The conception of the work, and the discrimination and learning with which it is 
 executed, adapt it most thoroughly to the present state and forms of controversy 
 . on the subject to which it relates." NONCONFORMIST.
 
 20 NEW WORKS AND NEW EDITIONS, 
 
 THEOLOGICAL MANUALS-continued. 
 
 2. A History of the Christian Church from the Seventh 
 
 Century to the Reformation. By CHARLES HARDWICK, M.A., 
 Fellow of St. Catharine's College, Divinity Lecturer of King's 
 College, and Christian Advocate in the University of Cambridge, 
 Author of " A History of the XXXIX Articles." With Four 
 Maps constructed for this Work by A. Keith Johnston. 
 
 Crown 8vo. cloth, 10#. 6rf. 
 
 OPINIONS OP THE PRESS. 
 
 " It is full in references and authority, systematic and formal in division, with 
 enough of life in the siyle to counteract the dryness inseparable from its brevity, 
 and exhibiting the results rather than the principles of investigation. MR. 
 HARDWICK is to be congratulated on tfte successful achievement of a difficult 
 task." CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER. 
 
 " He has lestowed patient and extensive reading on the collection of his materials ; 
 he has selected them with judgment ; and he presents them in an equable and 
 compact style." SPECTATOR. 
 
 " This book is one of a promised series of ' THEOLOGICAL MANUALS.' In one 
 respect, it may be taken as a sign of the times. It is a small unpretending 
 volume in appearance, but it is based on learning enough to have sufficed, half a 
 century since, for the ground of two or three quartos, or at least for several 
 portly octavos. For its purpose it is admirable, giving you a careful and intel- 
 ligent summary of events, and at the same time indicating the best sources of 
 information for the further guidance of the student. Among the authorities 
 thus referred to, we find the most modern as well as the most ancient, the con- 
 tinental as well as the English." BRITISH QUARTERLY. 
 
 " It is distinguished by the same diligent research and conscientious acknowledg- 
 ment of authorities which procured for MR. HARDWICK'S ' History of the 
 Articles of Religion' such a favourable reception." NOTES AND QUERIES. 
 
 " To a good method and good materials MR. HARDWICK adds that great virtue, 
 a perfectly transparent style. We did not expect to find great literary qualities 
 in such a manual, but we have found them; we should be satisfied in this 
 respect with conciseness and intelligibility ; but while this book has both, it it 
 also elegant, highly -finished, and highly interesting" NONCONFORMIST. 
 
 " As a manual for the student of Ecclesiastical History in the Middle Ages, we 
 know no English work which can be compared to MR. HARDWICK'S book. It 
 has two great merits, that it constantly refers the reader to the authorities, both 
 original and critical, on which its statements are founded; and that it pre- 
 lerves a just proportion in dealing with various subjects" GUARDIAN.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 21 
 
 THEOLOGICAL MANUALS-continued. 
 
 3. A History of the Christian Church during the 
 Reformation. By CHARLES HARDWICK, M.A. 
 
 Crown 8vo. cloth, 10*. Gd. 
 
 OPINIONS OP THE PRESS. 
 
 " The whole volume displays a profusion of learning, great accuracy and honesty 
 in collecting and collating authorities, a clear as well as a concise narrative of 
 events ; and it always refers to the authorities on which the history is grounded" 
 
 CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER. 
 
 " Exhibits a deep comprehension and a firm grasp of his theme, with the ease and 
 
 mastery in treatment which such qualities generally impart The utility 
 
 of MR. HARDWICK'S work consists in bringing the greater and minor historiet 
 connected with the Reformation into a single volume of compact shape, as well as 
 presenting their broad features to the student. The merit of the history con- 
 sists in the penetration with which the opinions of the age, the traits of itt 
 remarkable men, and the intellectual character of the history, are perceived, and 
 the force with which they are presented." SPECTATOR. 
 
 " A more satisfactory manual than England has hitherto produced. He hat 
 
 laboured learnedly and diligently, at first hand, among the sources and autho- 
 rities for the ecclesiastical history of the period of which he writes ; and has 
 produced a work really original, as far as such a work can be ; independent 
 in its judgments ; written with taste and feeling ; and offering, in its large 
 body of notes, aids and guidance to the fullest investigation the subject can pos- 
 sibly receive." NONCON FORMI ST. 
 
 " His readers will find him a lively, a luminous, and interesting companion, at 
 well as a generally trustworthy guide." BRITISH BANKER. 
 
 "He enters fairly into the questions of which he speaks, and does not attempt 
 to evade their difficulty by vague statements . . . We cordially recommend 
 this work to those who desire an orderly and htcid summary of the leading 
 events of the Reformation . . . We may also observe, that Mr. JSardwick 
 has availed himself of the latest German authorities." 
 
 LITERARY CHURCHMAN. 
 
 " The style is lucid and the plan comprehensive. The facts are well arranged, 
 and their relations ably brought out . . . Will be esteemed by most students 
 as judicious, helpful, and suggestive." EVANGELICAL REVIEW. 
 
 " He writes from genuine and independent sources. Though his work is short, 
 it partakes in no respect of the character of a compilation." THE PRESS. 
 
 " It is impossible to speak too highly of the extensive and careful research the 
 book everywhere manifests" BAPTIST MAOAZINZ.
 
 22 NEW WORKS AND NEW EDITIONS, 
 
 THEOLOGICAL MANUALS-continued. 
 
 4. A History of the Book of Common Prayer, 
 
 together with a Rationale of the several Offices. By the Rev. 
 FRANCIS PROCTER, M.A.., Vicar of Witton, Norfolk, formerly 
 Fellow of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. Third Edition, 
 revised and enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth, 10s. Qd. 
 "MR. PROCTER'S ' History of the Book of Common Prayer' is by far the lest 
 
 commentary extant Not only do the present illustrations embrace the 
 
 whole range of original source* indicated by MR. PALMER, but MR. PROCTER 
 compares the present Book of Common Prayer with the Scotch and American 
 forms; and he frequently sets out in full the Sarum Offices. As a manual of 
 extensive information, historical and ritual, imbued with sound Church princi- 
 ples, we are entirely satisfied with MR. PROCTER'S important volume" 
 
 CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER. 
 "It is a resume of all that has been done in the way of investigation in reference to 
 
 the Prayer-Book." ATHEN.EUM. 
 
 " We can have little doubt that MR. PROCTER'S History of our Liturgy will soon 
 supersede the well-known work of WHEATLY, and become a much-used hand- 
 book beyond the circuits of the University for the more immediate use of which 
 it has been produced."^ NOTES AND QUERIES. 
 
 "Although very decidedly anti-Roman in its tone, we gladly accept it as a substitute 
 for the dull and dreary dogmatism of WHEATLY. It presents, in a popular and 
 agreeable narrative, the history of those variations to which so much attention 
 hat been directed during the late eventful controversies ; and while it contains a 
 very careful, learned and scholarlike exposition oftlwse changes, it also furnishes 
 a most valuable commentary on the successive texts of the formularies themselves, 
 as they are exhibited either in the original editions, or in the useful manuals of 
 BULLEY and KEELING." DUBLIN REVIEW (Roman Catholic}. 
 " We can speak with just praise of this compendious but comprehensive volume. It 
 appears to be compiled with great care and judgment, and has profited largely by 
 the accumulated materials collected by the learning and research of the last fifty 
 years. It is a manual of great value to the student of Ecclesiastical History and 
 of almost equal interest to every admirer of the Liturgy and Services of the 
 English Church." LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW. 
 
 " It is indeed a complete and fairly -written history of the Liturgy ; and from the 
 dispassionate way in which disputed points are touched on, will prove to many 
 troubled consciences what ought to be known to them, viz. : that they may, 
 without fear of compromising the principles of evangelical truth, give their assent 
 and consent to the contents of the Boole of Common Prayer. MR. PROCTER h as 
 done a great service to the Church by this admirable digest." 
 
 CHURCH OF ENGLAND QUARTERLY. 
 OTHERS ARE IN PROGRESS, AND WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN DUE TIME.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 23 
 
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